Why Didn't You Tell Me?
by Carrie86
Summary: Set between Ozymandias and before Felina, focussing on Skyler, Marie and Flynn, and primarily following Skyler's explanation to her sister of why she did what she did
1. Chapter 1

_I've finally finished this story! After two years haha. I've added and changed things throughout it, so if you've read it before, just forget about that and start at the beginning. I've also updated my other story "Broken Bad" tonight, but that was just to fix errors, whereas this one has had a full overhaul._

 _This story is set after Ozymandias and before Felina, and it focusses on Skyler, Marie, Flynn and Holly._

….

Nobody spoke for the rest of the night.

Ramey left around midnight, the APD detectives soon after, instructing the two uniformed officers to stay. They took turns standing by the door and moving about the house, looking through the windows to see if they could glimpse the great Heisenberg returning home.

It was a moot point, since their police car was parked outside, and they knew he wouldn't be back anyway, but they had to do something.

Marie remained on the sofa facing forward, crying silently, stopping, then starting again and continuing intermittently throughout the night. Skyler looked at her a handful of times, her mind grappling for something, anything to say to her sister and then, having failed, turning back to the baby clinging to her neck, and kissing her hair, stroking her back and rocking her to sleep. Holly's little fists were balled in Skyler's hair, and Skyler had never felt the child grip so strongly.

Flynn was the only one who had spoken. First in disbelief, then in anger and then, when replies to his questions didn't come, in hurt confusion.

"I don't understand," he said again, and then fell silent.

Hours passed.

A lone bird in the back garden signalled the coming of morning. There was a grey light outside, grey and cold. Flynn's head lolled back on the sofa, snatching a few moments of sleep, before he awoke cold. He looked to his left and right to see that his mother and aunt hadn't moved, but his aunt was now bunched forward, gripping her hands together. "Are you cold, Aunt Marie?" he asked. She looked at him, but didn't reply. He pulled the rug from off the back of the sofa, folded it in half and wrapped it around her. She grabbed it and pulled it tight.

Flynn stood up to go to the bathroom. Skyler looked at her sister again, the same expression of shock, fear and horror still on her face, and tears in her eyes. Marie didn't look back.

Flynn emerged from his parents' bedroom and stood at the end of the hallway for a long time before he began to walk slowly along it. One of the APD officers was standing in the kitchen. After another long pause, Flynn began to walk towards him.

"W-what happens now?" he asked the man.

The officer looked at his partner and back at the boy. "Well," he said. "Now, we look for your father. There's a lot of officers out there looking. APD, DEA, they're all looking. We will find him."

"What about my uncle Hank?"

"They're looking for him too."

Flynn stepped into the kitchen and opened the fridge, taking out some sliced cheese and putting it on the island counter. "Has…anybody heard anything?" he asked, moving around the kitchen and trying to look nonchalant, hoping the officer couldn't hear his heart pounding.

The officer didn't reply.

"I mean, can't you ask them?" Flynn pressed. "Can you...r-radio them and ask for an update?"

The officer looked at his partner and pulled his phone out of his pocket, stepping out of the kitchen as he dialled.

"Sir, this is Fernandez. No change here." The officer slid open the door to the back yard and stepped through it.

Flynn made two cheese sandwiches and put them under the grill, then he looked up at his mother and aunt and began to make another two. "Do you guys want something to eat?" he asked. "Mom?"

Skyler looked up, her expression still unchanged. She shook her head slowly. "No, thank you, honey," she said. All she really wanted was a cigarette.

"Aunt Marie?"

Marie's head turned to look at her sister for the first time in several hours. For the first time since she had yelled, "What did he say? What did he say about Hank?" after Walt had hung up the phone. "What did he say?" she had yelled, and her sister had said nothing, but the answer was there in her eyes.

Flynn busied himself with the food, looking at the time and wondering whether it was still too early to call Lewis.

Skyler closed her eyes and hugged Holly close, weighing up her psychological need to never let the child out of her sight again, and her physiological need for nicotine. She breathed in and out, deciding to wait until Flynn had sat back down so that she could give the baby to him instead of Marie. A shock of fear rushed through her as she thought of the future, of being thrown into prison and Marie taking Holly and never giving her back.

Marie looked at her, trying to understand. Seeing the fear and the love for her children. Trying to fathom why. If it was for the children, maybe she could understand. She'd do anything for those kids too. But they'd now been hurt irrevocably and it was all the fault of their parents. The fault of Skyler, who could have stopped this at any time. Skyler, who'd chosen a sociopathic murderer over her own sister. How could either of them have got it so wrong?

Officer Fernandez stepped back into the room. "Nothing to report, son," he said kindly. "But they are still looking and I assure you, they will be found." He turned to his partner, who was looking out the front window. "Turner, can you see 'em?" he asked.

"Just pulled up," said Turner.

"Mrs White, there's now a surveillance car outside your house. It's going to stay there for a while. The officers inside it are under instructions to look, not approach, so we'd really appreciate it if you wouldn't approach them unless it's an emergency. If it's an emergency, go ahead. You also have the phone numbers for the agents looking after your case and if your husband makes any attempt to contact you, you must call them straight away. There is now a tap on your landline phone, and the DEA is arranging the same for the cell phones of all three of you." He looked around. "This is for your own protection in case he contacts you, do you understand? And if you see or remember something or if you have any concerns or questions, don't hesitate to call. And if at any time you feel that you may be in danger, or if you see Heisenberg or any of his associates approaching you, do not hesitate to call 911 - I mean do not pause, do not think about it, just call. The fine young man in the kitchen here did exactly the right thing yesterday when he called 911." He nodded at Flynn. "We are here to keep you and your children safe, Mrs White, do you understand? Do not hesitate to call us."

Skyler nodded. "Thank you."

"Alright, Officer Tyler and I are gonna head off now, but there are two other officers right outside, as I said."

Ever the good hostess, Skyler rose to see them out. Officer Fernandez remained where he stood, turning to look at her sister, who had bent forward again, looking at her hands. "Mrs Schrader," he said. "Can we give you a lift anywhere? Home, or…to a friend's house?"

Marie looked up, startled. Here, she thought. This was the only place she had ever come in times of trouble. The only person she had ever turned to was right here. But this time, she was the cause of it.

She shook her head, and the officers turned to leave. Adjusting her hold on Holly, Skyler opened the front door for them, thanking them for their trouble. "8:30 at the DEA, SAC Ramey said," said Officer Turner. "Don't forget. It is very much in your interest to go in."

"I'll be there," said Skyler as she closed the door behind them.

Flynn pushed a small plate of grilled cheese sandwiches into Marie's hands as he sat back down with his own larger plate. "You should have something to eat, Aunt Marie," he said. He held his own plate out to his mother. "You too, Mom," he said.

Skyler shook her head as she walked briskly to Holly's playpen, laying the still sleeping baby down as gently as she could, before running to the bathroom as fast as her legs would allow her to go whilst her mind still tried to keep them moving as slowly and calmly as possible so as not to worry her family. This was an automatic process which she rapidly realised now had no meaning, so she let it go halfway along the corridor and pounded through the bedroom and around to the bathroom, throwing herself down in front of the toilet as she began to retch.

It was more dry retching than vomiting, as she hadn't eaten anything since the salad sandwich she'd gulped down in her office yesterday while Walt had watched the register. She hadn't even finished it, she reflected, because Saul had arrived and her husband had told her another lie about needing to go and check something outside, leaving the register unattended.

She wanted to go back. How she wanted to go back. Not to then, though. Further. Back to when he told her they had to make the video. No, further. Back to when Hank had called her that fateful day. Hank. No. Not then. Back further. Back to when Fring had been trying to kill them? Why hadn't she just asked the DEA for help? But she couldn't, she was too deeply involved by then. So were Hank and Marie, because the drug money had been paying Hank's medical bills.

Skyler stood up, flushed the toilet and washed her face. When? she thought. Her hands shook as she took out a cigarette and unlatched the sliding door at the edge of the bedroom. When could I have stopped this?

She stepped outside and closed the door quietly, lighting the cigarette and sucking on it deeply.

Back to when she'd said she'd be the Danny. No, further back. Marie needed the money then and Skyler had wanted to give it to her clean. Further back. Before Hank was shot. Well before then. To when he'd first shown her the money, in an open sports bag on the living room floor? She should have taken it to the police. She knew where he kept it. That was the evidence that would have put a stop to all this. But instead, she'd just…held it. Looked at it, held it, and then….kept it.

Taking another deep drag of her cigarette, Skyler realised that her son was right. She was as bad as Walt. Flynn had called 911 without a moment's hesitation. Skyler didn't do that because she was as bad as Walt was. She was just as bad. And now because of her, Hank was dead.

She broke down, sliding down the glass and curling into a ball on the concrete, gasping and sobbing, alone.


	2. Chapter 2

A piercing wail came suddenly from the playpen, breaking the morning silence.

"Holly?" said Flynn, jumping up and taking the screaming child into his arms, but she only wailed louder. Marie ran to his side and the two of them rocked and patted her. "It's OK, Holly," said Flynn, "You're OK." But she wasn't. He could see she wasn't. Her eyes were darting around the room with an expression that could only be described as horror, and he'd never heard her make that noise before.

Skyler jumped up and sprinted to the dining room door, just as Holly began to scream, "MAMA! MAMAAAAAAAAAAAA!" Skyler fairly fell into the room and rushed to her son's side, taking the baby from him and holding her close to her chest.

"It's OK, it's OK, baby, Mama's here." Holly's tiny arms latched onto Skyler's neck again and held on, just as they had when the police had brought her back from the fire station. She continued to scream and wail, her legs kicking up and down and her arms gripping her mother as if her life depended on it. Flynn continued to pat her back and made faces behind their mother's shoulder, something Holly usually liked a lot, she used to laugh and clap when he did that, but this time it had no effect as the child continued to wail.

"Skyler, what's going on?"

It was the first time Marie had spoken in several hours. She was looking at her niece with an expression of deep concern. "Skyler, why is she doing that? She's never done that before, why is she doing that?"

Skyler continued to make soothing noises and rub her daughter's back. Holly's volume fell as she burrowed in, burying her face in her mother's neck.

"She…must have…had a nightmare," said Flynn.

"No, I've seen Holly have nightmares, she does not do _that_ when she has a nightmare. Sky?"

Skyler looked at Marie, tears streaming down her face.

"What did Walt do to her? Yesterday, when… when he took her, what did he _do_ , how did he…"

Skyler's body tensed as she collapsed onto the sofa, trying to hide her own sobs from her distraught daughter. "Shhhshhhshhh," she murmured, making the awful realisation that not only had she failed to protect her children from their father's crimes, she had now actively made it worse, not only for Flynn, who had had to suffer the horror of learning the truth about his father, learning his uncle had been murdered and witnessing his parents wrestling with a knife on the same afternoon, but also for the tiny baby who had sat on her father's lap and watched her mother scream in terror and bang on the glass of the car window before it sped away from her.

"He gr…grabbed her from here, from the playpen, and ran out," Flynn explained to his aunt.

"Where did he put her, he was in some stolen old truck, it can't have had a baby seat, how did he even - ?"

"He had her on his lap, he'd locked the door, and…" Skyler sighed. "I was banging on the glass and screaming, and she saw, and heard, all of that." She looked up at her sister, making eye contact with her for the first time since her eyes had told her her husband was dead.

"Wonderful parents you are," spat Marie. "I was going to offer to take her while you go to the DEA, but it looks like she won't let you go!"

"I'll take her with me," said Skyler. "Is that, do they… If I take her, will they let me keep her with me?"

"They'll have to, if they don't want her screaming the house down! But you'll have to give her back if they take you into custody – you have them call me, if that happens, Skyler, I am not having her looked after by some social worker – you have them call me, so you can give her direct to me, nobody else."

"What…what do you mean?" Flynn looked at his aunt, his eyes wide.

The two women were silent.

"Is M-Mom going to jail?"

"Not now, they won't do it now. They're waiting for him to contact her – the phones are tapped, like the guy said. It'll probably be a few days before they can figure out what to charge her with, anyway, not until they've stopped chasing their tails and eating their hats and shaking their heads in disbelief about it because none of them had a clue, none of them, their small little brains would never have figured it out, just like they never would have figured out what Gus Fring was doing if Hank hadn't told them, so now, they -" Her voice broke briefly. "…they won't have a clue what to do right now, but they will figure it out eventually, and…then yeah."

"Y-yeah what?"

"Well, you know, she -"

"Marie."

"You wanna weigh in here, Skyler?"

"Leave Flynn out of it."

"He asked a question."

Skyler looked at her son. Her daughter continued to cling to her.

"Mom?" said Flynn.

"Yes," she said, and then gasped, only just now realising that it would truly happen. "Yes is the answer to your question."

Flynn's face contorted in horror and confusion. "Why? W…what did you do?" he said quietly.

Skyler looked at him. Her precious son that she had worked so hard to protect, and had so spectacularly failed. "I'm sorry," she said again, her voice breaking.

Flynn stepped back. "You're s...sorry? W...wow, yeah, thanks Mom," he said sarcastically, beginning to pace around the room. "Th…that's all you can say? You're telling me that both my parents are cr...criminal murderers, and n...now Uncle Hank is dead, and all you can say is s...sorry?"

Marie stepped to his side, putting her arm around him. They stood together, looking back at Skyler, their eyes full of confusion and pain.

Skyler looked up at them for a long time. Guilt almost made her look away, but she wanted to hold their gaze for as long as possible, aware that this might be the last time they were together as a family, the last time she could ever hold them as her own. For the first time, she understood what her husband had felt yesterday when two people he loved had stared at him in horror, fear and defiant rejection, and he had realised the only one left he could still relate to was the tiny baby now in Skyler's arms.

"You… you did it together, didn't you?" said Marie quietly. "That's why you wouldn't talk to Hank, that's why you…"

Skyler stood, shaking her head vehemently. "No," she gulped. "I didn't want this, not any of it, I -"

She cut herself off as she looked at her son. From now on, to defend herself meant blackening his father. Blaming him for everything. Saying he forced her.

"Then why did you let it happen?" yelled Marie, erupting into tears again.

Skyler stood speechless, her eyes conveying a thousand emotions completely unintelligible to Flynn and Marie.

I was trying to limit the damage, Skyler kept thinking. That was the only thought that would formulate in her head. But it made no sense, she knew. How did this happen? Why did I do this? I was trying to limit the damage. I was trying to protect my family from the man who protects this family. "I failed," she whimpered.

"WHY?" Marie screamed. "Why did this happen? Why didn't you just help him when he asked you? At ANY TIME you could have stopped this, you could have fixed everything, but instead you left him out there on his own and now he's dead!" Marie's pitch rose as she stomped around the room to the front door. "YOU WOULDN'T HELP HIM, AND NOW HE'S DEAD!" She ripped open the front door and fell through it, her grief echoing down the street.

"Aunt Marie!" Without another look at his mother, Flynn followed, the door slamming behind him.

Skyler stood, her child still clinging to her neck, trying to stop her entire body from shaking.


	3. Chapter 3

It all went by as if she were in a dream. Telling the DEA everything, and having them ask her a thousand questions she didn't know the answer to. Realising she had never known anything at all. Ramey telling her the magistrate would not look favourably on her if she didn't give them something they could work with. Realising the only person she could give them was Saul Goodman. Realising that he'd realised the same thing at the same time and disappeared. Telling them he knew someone who could disappear people, and then not being able to answer any further questions about it because she really did know nothing.

The men in balaclavas put the fear of god into her. Up until that point, she hadn't mentioned the woman who'd come into the car wash because she hadn't thought of it; they kept asking her about where Walt cooked and who he cooked with and who he supplied, and other than Jesse Pinkman and Gus Fring she knew no names, and she realised she didn't even know what he'd done with Jesse Pinkman and Gus Fring, not really. Everything she told them, they threw back in her face – they either already knew about it or the person was dead or disappeared so it was a moot point.

Having carried the burden for over a year of having a terrible secret no-one in her family knew, of always knowing when Walt was lying while Flynn, Hank and Marie believed him every time, after watching people fall for all the lies, she realised that, while she had known that they were lies, she had never actually known what the truth was. Every time she asked him he'd either change the topic or tell another lie. Pretty soon, she'd given up asking, and given up wondering, too, because whatever he was doing didn't bear thinking about. When she'd first walked out on him, he'd said, "If I tell you the truth, will you stay?" but she hadn't wanted to hear it, she'd said she was afraid to know, not realising that she was putting nails in her own coffin all the while.

"Rack your brain," the prosecutor said, and she did. She really did. And she realised she knew nothing.

It didn't matter, anyway. Skyler deserved everything she got. She believed that with every fibre of her soul.

….

The heat pump flicked on again. It did that about once every half an hour, whenever the temperature fell. Marie had it set to a pretty high temperature, because she hoped the heat would put her to sleep. But all it made her do was throw off the covers and stomp through the house to turn it off, wiping the sweat off her brow as she went.

She flopped into an armchair and sat there for some time, staring straight ahead into the darkness.

The phone rang. Marie stood and padded over to it. The screen was glowing in the darkness. "Skyler&Walt," it said.

She picked it up, and said nothing.

"Did I wake you?"

Marie wanted to say something sarcastic in retort, like, "Oh yeah, the first time you call your sister after she screamed at you and ran out of your house after you destroyed her entire life, the first time you call after you and your husband rained hellfire on all of us, and it's 2:30am on a Tuesday morning and you're not worried about any of that, you're just worried about whether you've woken me which, given that you decided to call me at 2:30 in the morning, you obviously don't give a crap about doing!"

The flash of anger was good, Marie thought. It helped her to function and to feel. But as soon as she felt it it was gone, replaced by the deep, stabbing pain of betrayal she felt every time she so much as thought about her sister these days.

"No," she replied flatly.

"Sorry, I – I wouldn't call if I didn't, I mean I won't call if you don't want me to, unless it's…."

"Unless what?"

"Unless it's for the kids."

A pause.

"Flynn seems fine, he called by this afternoon."

"Will you take them?"

"After you're thrown in prison? Yes, absolutely, and I probably won't give them back afterwards. I've found a child psychologist for Holly, she seems very good, her office is off Tramway not far from my place."

"Marie, she's 18 months, she can't…string sentences together."

"I know, but as soon as she can, it's the only way to mend the damage caused by her deranged parents."

Skyler nodded. "That's fine. But I'm not talking about…later, I'm talking about now, will you take the kids now?"

"What? Why?"

"Because they're not safe."

"I've heard that one before - déjà vu, Skyler!"

"Yes, and…It was true then, and it's true now."

"Walt's gone. Left you in his dust."

"It wasn't Walt, I wasn't… Back then, it wasn't Walt I had to protect them from, he would never hurt his children, he -"

"Oh, as demonstrated by Holly's screaming fit the other day? Really?"

Skyler closed her eyes and took another long drag on her cigarette. "I mean not intentionally. He's not the one I was afraid of – for the kids. I was afraid of the people he was working with."

"Mmhm. And who are they?"

"I don't know. As the DEA have made abundantly clear, I don't know _anything_ , but they don't know that."

A gust of wind came, and a branch tapped a window at the far end of the house. Dropping the phone and grabbing the kitchen knife off the arm of the sofa she had been sitting on, Skyler ran to Holly's crib, which was between the other sofa and the coffee table.

"So? What are you talking about?" said Marie. "Sky?"

Gently picking the baby up and holding her close in her left arm while holding the knife out with her right, Skyler shrunk down between the sofa and the bookcase.

"Skyler? Hello?"

Hearing the phone, Skyler reached out and grabbed it, bringing it back to her ear, trapping it between her ear and her shoulder whilst still gripping the knife. "If you hear me scream, call 911," she breathed.

Marie's expression changed completely. "What? Skyler, what's happening? Are you OK?"

"Nothing. Shoosh for a minute."

She heard the sound again, and realised what it was. It was a branch Junior used to complain would keep him awake. He asked Walt to trim it, and Walt never did. Skyler breathed a sigh of relief.

She stood up and sat back down on the sofa, placing the knife on the cushion beside her, but not placing the baby back in the crib.

"It's OK, Marie, don't worry. I just heard a noise, and…. it was just a tree branch, it's nothing."

"Do I have to ask you again to tell me what the hell is happening?"

"Nothing's happening. I heard a tree branch on the window and I thought it was someone breaking in."

Her tone hadn't changed. Her volume had risen slightly from when she was telling Marie to call 911, but it was still very quiet, and it bore no emotion, except maybe fear. "Sky, are you OK?"

Skyler scoffed, slightly. "Are you?"

"No, but I'm not jumping at tree branches!"

"Back to my previous point. Will you take the kids?"

"Because you don't think they're safe now. Why aren't they safe now?"

Skyler didn't respond.

"There's cops right outside your house. There's none outside mine."

"They don't do anything. They don't want to help me." Skyler reached for her cigarette packet, then realised she couldn't light one because she was still holding Holly. She held the packet to her forehead and sighed.

"Skyler, tell me. What are you afraid of?"

Skyler didn't respond.

"The people Walt was working with, that's what you said before. Well, I hate to say it, but they know where I live too, they broke in the other day."

Skyler's eyes shot open. "What?"

"Anyway, your place is probably bugged, you're probably all way safer there!"

"They broke in? What happened? Are you alright?"

"I wasn't there, it was when I was still at your house. The front door was smashed in and stuff was thrown everywhere. They put me in a hotel last night."

"This happened… two days ago?" Skyler's heart broke at the realisation that a traumatic thing had happened to her sister, that her home had been attacked, and she hadn't called her.

"Did you, are you…I mean…What did they…?"

"They only took one thing, the videotape of Jesse Pinkman's confession. Hank and Steve made it. So yes, it was definitely the people Walt was working with, and I doubt they'll come back here, I mean, I think they got what they wanted, but… I don't even have Hank's gun to keep me safe, so I think you're doing better over there."

Skyler breathed in and out, riding the shock wave. Yes, she thought. Hank and Marie's house had been a safer place for the children when Hank was there, but now… She breathed in and out.

"Flynn's at Lewis's house, right?"

"Yeah," Skyler choked.

"How's Holly doing?"

"Umm. I dunno. I can't let her out of my sight. I brought the crib to the living room, because I have to protect her." She didn't know why she was telling her sister this. "I'm sorry, no, it's fine, I – I didn't mean to bother you, I'm sorry for calling so late, I lost track of time."

"Sky, are you OK? You don't sound OK."

Her breath was short. "I'm fine."

Marie stood up and looked at the clock. "I'm coming over."

….

Marie agonised the whole drive over, asking herself why was she doing this, why _should_ she do this, why should she give a crap about some bad emotional state her sister was in that was entirely her own fault!

She'd agonised the same way the day she'd gone to the car wash. But ultimately, she'd arrived at the conclusion that family was family, and that no matter what Skyler had done she still loved her, and so she wanted to help her.

She had no idea how close this thought process, this pulling shoes on, then kicking them off again, driving down the block and then turning back again, this to-ing and fro-ing, questioning and justifying, how close this brought her to her sister's own thought process. This was exactly what Skyler had done with Walt, over and over, time and time again.

Finally, the house came into view, and Marie's car came to a stop next to the surveillance car that had two DEA agents inside. She wound her window down. Recognising her, they did the same.

"Hey Marie, how you doing?" the agent in the passenger seat smiled kindly.

"OK, how are you?"

"Fine, yeah, working hard."

"I bet, listen, has anything happened here tonight? I mean, did anyone come to the house, or…"

"No, no, quiet as a grave. Err, I mean, ah -" the agent clapped his mouth shut as his partner hit him on the arm. "No, nothing's happening, Marie, the lights have been off for a few hours now and there's nobody about."

"And nobody came by earlier?"

"No."

"OK, thanks guys." Marie put her window up and drove forward, parking next to her sister's car in the driveway of 308 Negra Arroyo Lane.

She knocked on the door. She heard a little scrabbling and scraping, then the door opened just a crack and she could see her sister's frightened eyes glowing in the darkness.

"What's going on, Sky? You don't have the lights on?"

Skyler hurried her sister inside and locked the door. "I can see more with them off," she said.

"Is Holly OK? Why are you carrying her around?"

"Like I said, I don't want her out of my sight."

"Well out of your arms is a little different to out of your sight – the crib is there, I see."

Skyler looked at the crib, and back at her sister. "Yeah." She leant down and placed Holly inside it, tucking her in tenderly.

"Are you gonna tell me what happened tonight?"

"Nothing happened."

"Oh, you're still lying to me, are you, well that's nice, that did us so well in the past."

"I can't, I – I can't, I-"

"Skyler, sit down. I have never seen you like this, what is going on?"

Skyler sighed, reflecting that actually her sister had seen her frightened for her life and her children's lives on more than one occasion, but that she must have been such a good actress that Marie hadn't realised. "I'm sorry, Marie," she said. "I didn't mean to bother you."

"Well you have now! So tell me the truth!"

"There's no truth, it's not… There was no one thing that happened, it's just logical, isn't it, I mean, I've been talking to the police, and the last people that did that got murdered, I mean, it's not a huge leap to…"

"You mean the criminals that were killed in jail?"

"Yes."

"Did somebody threaten you? Did somebody tell you not to talk to the police?"

"No, and I've already told them everything I know anyway, which is NOTHING, so, don't worry, please don't worry, I am so sorry that I bothered you, I was just thinking about the kids, but you're right, I have cops here and you don't, so maybe they are safer here." Skyler sat down on the sofa, cradling her arms. "I have to convince Flynn to come back. He'll be safer here too. We'll all be safer if we look out for each other."

Marie sat down next to her, not seeing the knife until it was almost too late. She let out a yelp and moved sideways. "Sky!"

Skyler grabbed the knife and put it back on the arm of the chair. "Sorry."

"Why do you have a knife?"

"Just being careful."

"What?"

"I am so sorry to bother you, Marie, I am so sorry. You do not deserve to have me bother you."

"Why did you then?"

Skyler looked down. "Because there's no-one else I trust."

"Mmm, how do you think I feel, then, there's no-one I trust." She let the poison of those words sink in for a moment, and then relented. "I get the fear, though. I get it. Mom would say this is very un-feminist of me, but I don't wanna be a woman on my own. I don't wanna have to take care of myself. I hate that. I'm no good at that. Guess I'm stuck with it now, though."

Skyler nodded, and cried. "I'm so sorry, Marie!" she wept.

Marie got up and looked down at Holly, sleeping peacefully. She really was worried about the child's emotional state, and she hoped her mother was too.

She was less worried about Skyler's emotional state, preferring to let her cry and feel awful because she felt she deserved it. But if she was afraid, as she certainly seemed to be, Marie would stay. She hated being alone in her house anyway. It felt so big and empty without him.

Marie walked over to the kitchen and slowly made two cups of coffee. She didn't look back at Skyler. Occasionally she heard a noise, and she couldn't tell if Skyler was weeping or whimpering in fear, and she didn't much care.

"Alright," she said, as she strode back over to the living room with the coffee cups. "I'm gonna stay here for as long as it takes for you to calm down. I want you to do that for Holly. She is very small, but she can hear and she can feel and she knows when things aren't right, so you need you to calm down and get it together for her. You are extremely good at getting it together, and at pretending you have it together when you don't, and I am feeling better being here participating in something real instead of looking at the four walls of my home and drowning in loneliness, so I am going to stay right here for as long as it takes. Not for your sake, but for mine and Holly's."

Skyler nodded.

"However," Marie continued. "Since I am here, and you are there," she gestured. "I am going to ask one thing of you for which, I think, I deserve a truthful answer. And as it is now," she looked at the clock, "3:25 in the morning, we have plenty of time to get through a very full and detailed answer." She took a sip of her coffee, then put it down on the coffee table, leaned towards her sister and looked her in the eye. "What I want to know, Skyler, is _why_?"

Skyler nodded at her sister, then looked down at the coffee she had brought her. She cradled the mug in both hands, savouring its warmth. When she gripped it, her hands didn't shake so much. She took a sip, her mind racing. "I don't know where to start," she said. "Where do you want me to start?"

"Let's try the beginning. Since you still haven't told me when you found out."

"That's pretty obvious, isn't it, it's when I kicked him out of the house. Although then all I thought was that he was dealing marijuana. Which seems really funny to think about now. It shows that I have no integrity at all, because I kicked him out of the house when I thought he was dealing marijuana, but when I knew he was a methamphetamine kingpin, I just… I let him stay here, I let him watch the kids, I shut my mouth and I laundered his money."

"Walt's a very manipulative man."

"Yeah." Skyler nodded vehemently. "Yeah. He came back unbidden twice, I never asked him to move back in, he just did it. It didn't feel like a partnership any more, it didn't feel like a relationship, he just did things, and…I just dealt with them."

" _Why_ didn't you go to the police?"

"I did once. Sort of, I… I kicked him out and I served him with divorce papers, and I attempted to make a bargain with him by saying that if he stayed away, if he stayed completely away from me and the kids, I wouldn't tell anyone. And he just…wouldn't do that, he wouldn't sign the papers, and one day he just came back to the house and wouldn't leave. He broke in and he wouldn't leave, and I called the police and they came, and I told them that Walt was trespassing and that I wanted them to escort him out, and they asked me if we were divorced and I said we weren't and they asked me whose names were on the deeds to the house and I said both of us, and they asked me if he hit me and I said no. And that police officer looked me in the eye and asked me to give him something to work with, and he said, 'Do you know of anything illegal your husband has done, _anything_ at all?'… And I couldn't do it. Walt called my bluff, and he won, like he knew he would - I just couldn't do it. Meantime he's sitting over there with Flynn and Holly being the perfect dad and being polite and jovial with the police officers, and… I couldn't do anything. I didn't have any proof anyway, not then. And there was Flynn eating grilled cheese with his dad and looking at him with love in his eyes, defending him to the hilt – I wasn't going to do that in front of Flynn, I'm… When I found out what Walt was doing, it broke my heart. It destroyed my marriage and my life. I just didn't want Flynn to have to go through that if it could be avoided."

"It couldn't have been. And when he did find out it was in the worst possible way."

"Yeah, and I'll never forgive myself for that. But at the time, I just didn't know it would get that bad. I thought Walt was just trying to make a quick buck to pay for the cancer treatment and that afterwards, either he would die, debt free, or he would recover and go back to his normal life and nobody had to know."

"Why? Why did nobody have to know?"

"Because that was the only way to keep our family together. And for Hank to keep his job."

"You've gotta be kidding me."

"I'm not. The worst thing about what Walt did was the way he undermined Hank's position, he wouldn't have got nearly as far as he did if he hadn't…had a direct line, and the DEA wouldn't've taken kindly to that. It's no reflection on Hank, I mean…Hank would have caught…Heisenberg a lot sooner if he hadn't been hampered…by Walt."

"Hank would have caught Walt a lot sooner if he hadn't been hampered by _you_! _This_ is your justification? You're using _Hank's_ name -"

Holly stirred in her crib, and Skyler raised her arm. "Shhshh."

Marie's volume dropped. "I get it," she hissed. "I know exactly what you're referring to, you don't have to rub it in. This is the reason why when Hank found out and he was trying to catch Walt on his own _without_ your help, _this is the reason he wouldn't call it in!_ I told him to tell Ramey but he knew that the second he did, he would be _fired_! So he didn't tell the DEA, he kept working on his own, and _that's why when he and Steve went after Walt, they didn't have back up, and that's why they got killed_!"

Skyler gasped, and whimpered. It made sense, but no-one had told her that was why. She realised it must be why the bodies hadn't been found yet, either. Why nobody knew where they were. How would they find them now, with Walt gone?

Marie slumped back onto the sofa and began to cry. Skyler made to stand up, then slid back down again. Marie began to sob harder. Skyler sat for a while, not knowing what to say.

But this was it, she thought. This was the worst thing about the last three days – knowing that Marie was going through this without Skyler to support her. Skyler jumped up, moved the crib back from the sofa, sat next to Marie and put her arms around her. Marie fell into her, sobbing uncontrollably.

Both cried together, united for a while, and then slowly, they stopped.

Marie opened her eyes, letting the dark room come back into focus around her. The crib in front of her. The mantelpiece ahead.

"No," she said.

Skyler looked down at her sister's tousled hair.

"No," Marie repeated, sitting up suddenly. "That's not enough, Skyler. No. That's _ridiculous_ is what that is, that's not…"

Skyler nodded.

"I don't want broad generalisations and random statements out of thin air that you think are what I wanna hear – oh you _tried_ to go to the police – really? That was you trying, once, seriously? If you're not going to tell the police, Skyler, how about you tell someone else, huh? How about me? _Why didn't you tell me?"_ Marie stood up and went to sit in the armchair in a huff.

Skyler leaned toward Holly's cot, exhaling slowly. She gazed at the sleeping baby, fixed up part of the blanket that had come loose, and then leaned back. "Your life was a lot better before you knew about this, right?"

"Oh, when you had the wool pulled over my eyes, that was wonderful, yeah."

"If you and Hank had never found out, we'd all still be living our lives now, and ... we'd be OK. We'd never have to worry about any of this. My marriage would still be a train wreck, but that's… that was my bed to lie in, it didn't mess up your life. My life was hell before when he was doing it, but he stopped. He finally listened to me and he finally stopped, and I had my kids back and things were better. And for you, things were fine. Hank was getting better too. We were all OK. You can't deny that things were better before you knew."

Marie frowned, not following this at all. "But it was built on a lie."

Skyler shrugged. "Ignorance is bliss, it really is. I was so jealous of you and Flynn and Holly, for your ignorance. My life was so much better before I knew."

Marie continued to frown. "How did you find out?"

"I just put it together, it just… All the little things, the little lies, they added up. Eventually one of them fell over."

"Are you saying that you would rather have your husband lie to you over and over than to know the truth? No you wouldn't, I know you wouldn't! You're not stupid, you figured it out because you said, 'Hey Walt, that's bullshit, stop trying to manipulate me into believing bullshit!'"

"It broke my heart. I wish I'd never known."

"You wish he'd never done it."

"Yeah, that would be preferable, but…what Walt did was never something I could control. But I… I've been thinking about this lately, how I just didn't want to know. And actually I didn't, I only found out since I've been talking to the DEA that I still know nothing, he told me barely anything – he let me know things that I had figured out on my own, and on the odd occasion when I had the chance to learn more, I pulled back from it because I was afraid, and I'm paying for that now because I have nothing that the DEA wants to know, they're threatening me with….everything they can possibly throw at me, they can lock me up and throw away the key, but even though I want to help them, I can't because I don't know anything! And I ask myself why I didn't try to find out more – I could tell when Walt was lying, I didn't always know what it was about, most of the time I didn't, but I knew when he was hiding things from me and I couldn't control what he was doing, but I could have done some digging, surely. I could have found some things out if I'd tried hard enough. But I didn't even try, I just let him lie to me over and over, because…the one time that I looked deeper into it, the one time I didn't take him at his word and I looked properly into things… The one time I did that, the truth broke my heart. It was so much better before I knew."

"You know what Dave would say now?"

"What?"

"That's hindsight talking."

"Hindsight could tell me a lot of things."

"You got a grass is greener complex. But that's bullshit, it wasn't greener. Walt was lying, killing people, cooking meth, paying for your children's future with dirty money, and putting them in danger."

Skyler nodded.

"Knowledge is power. If you have knowledge of something, you can do something about it.

"I couldn't. I couldn't stop him."

"Which brings me back to my earlier point, you could have _told_ someone!"

Skyler looked at her hands. "You saw Flynn today?"

"Yeah. You didn't?"

"How'd he seem?"

"Attentive. Caring."

"In himself, though, how is he?"

"Well, he takes after his mother there, he wasn't letting anything show. He will never get over this – father issues, for a man, run really deep, they have no end – he'll be fine, he'll get through it because he's a strong and well-rounded young man, but he'll never get over it."

Skyler was silent, still looking down.

"That's Walt fault, though, not yours."

"He -" Skyler's voice broke, and she swallowed. "His life was so much better before he knew."

"Sure, but he had a right to know, and if you hadn't waited until after his father had killed his uncle before telling him, things would have gone a lot better for him."

Skyler let out a loud sob.

"He's not a child anymore, he can handle a whole lot more than you give him credit for. It's like that officer said, he just pulled out his phone and called 911, it was _that_ simple, and he could see that and he had the balls to do it, which is more than you ever managed."

"And now he has to live the rest of his life in the knowledge that he called 911 on his father."

"Well if you'd done it, he wouldn't've had to."

Skyler sobbed harder.

"And now he just hates Walt, which is more than you seem to have managed either. You got back together with the guy."

"H-He hates his father? How is that a good thing?"

"It's what Walt deserves."

"I don't care what Walt deserves, I care about what's best for Flynn! His whole life, he _adored_ his father, he – remember when he made the website? And he did so much to help support him through the cancer? And the way h-he always looked up to him and idealised him and... Are you saying that I should have smashed that?"

"Yes. You'd kicked Walt out of the house, Flynn was asking you why and blaming you – why couldn't you have just told him the truth then? Would it have been hard? Sure. Would he have screamed and yelled at you? Yes, well, that's what he did the other day anyway, so I don't see -"

"If no-one had ever found out. If our lives, if _all_ of our lives had just continued on in blissful ignorance, with only Walt and me ever knowing and me not knowing much anyway… If Flynn never knew, he'd be OK, he wouldn't have father issues, he'd have childhood memories he could cherish throughout his life knowing that he was loved and respected by his parents -"

"Respected? You think Walt _respects_ Flynn?"

"No! No he doesn't, he doesn't deserve Flynn at all, but they love each other!"

"What about you, where do you weigh in on this supposedly magical father-son relationship! Aren't you supposed to not let a drug dealer buy your son a sports car?"

"I tried!"

"Skyler, we're going in circles here. I drop it."

"And you say that he hates him now, well, yes, he'll have to, and he'll have to bear that crushing his heart and trying to stifle the love that's still there, that will always be there!"

"I'm not saying it's not horrible for Flynn. It is catastrophic for Flynn, it is the worst thing that could possibly happen to a kid of his age, or _any_ age -"

"Just because you start to hate someone doesn't mean you don't still love them. You can't stop that, you can't turn it off, you just love them and hate them at the same time, and it rips your heart in two!"

"OK, OK. So what I'm getting from this is that you didn't want _anyone_ to know because you didn't want Flynn to know."

"Yes! There were other reasons, my own…fear and my own lack of strength or power. My own heart. But…that was the one I always came back to. I couldn't be the one who…knowingly…shattered him."

"So waiting until after his uncle was murdered seemed like a good idea."

Skyler threw up her arms, a high-pitched cry escaping from her throat. Holly stirred, and she leaned over the crib, gently touching the baby's hair as her body convulsed with sobs.

"You still think that Walt could have gotten away with it. You still think that. That your fantasy world of nobody knowing could have been a reality forever."

"Does anybody ever plan to get caught?"

Marie scoffed. "You would have cracked up, you would have gone crazy, never being able to say a word to a single soul, never sharing the most fundamental facts of your life with your closest family – except the monster in your bed pulling your strings. Nobody can live like that, you would have gone stark raving mad."

"That's fine," Skyler sniffed. "As long as the kids are OK, that's fine. And you. And Hank."

"Bullshit. The kids, OK, sure, I can understand your anguish there, but me and Hank? How am I supposed to think you gave a damn about Hank when you REFUSED TO HELP HIM! I get that it's hard to just come right out and say something as huge as that to the police or to me, or to Flynn, when we didn't know anything about it, when it was coming out of the clear blue sky, but how about, Skyler, and why the _hell_ did you not, when Hank was sitting right in front of you asking you _directly_ to tell him what he already knew, when he was asking for your _help,_ how about you just ANSWER HIM! That is all you had to do, you didn't have to make a time or broach the subject or gear yourself up for it, and you didn't have to BLACKMAIL him, just ANSWER HIM!"

Holly stirred again, and Skyler raised a hand. She held it up, nodding, her eyes closed.

"If Holly wakes up, it'll be your fault, not mine."

Skyler kept nodding, a tear escaping her closed eyelids. She'd known this was coming, and she had no idea what to say.

"What are you, meditating? Cos that's not helping. I get that it was hard for you to have your husband turn into a monster, and I understand that dobbing him in is not an easy thing to do, and I _know_ you _hate_ asking for help, but when it was right there being offered to you? From your family who love you and wanted to help? Hank wanted to help you, he would have done anything for you and the kids, and you…threw it in his face."

A light crossed the room, and Skyler jumped up and shot to the window, fumbling for the knife.

"What, what is it?" hissed Marie.

Skyler's heart pounded as she stood at the edge of the window, peering forward just far enough to see through the crack behind the curtain. Then she relaxed. "It's Flynn," she said, taking the knife back to the knife block in the kitchen, where she put it safely away. The door opened, and she turned back to see Marie embracing Flynn.

"Hey, Aunt Marie," said Flynn. "What's going on, are you alright?"

"Not at all, but I'm very glad to see you."

Skyler stood motionless at the edge of the room, her eyes glistening.

"W-why are you here at -" Flynn looked at his watch "5:30 in the morning in the dark?"

"Long story. I could ask you the same question, young man."

"But why is it dark? Mom?" Flynn started walking towards his mother, who didn't move.

"That's because it's night time, honey!" said Marie.

Skyler switched on the light, then turned to hug Flynn, which helped her to compose herself. She smiled at him, with her mouth, not her eyes. "I have not seen you up this early since you were five years old, what is going on?"

"Oh yeah, it's…it's OK, I just couldn't sleep." He stepped into the kitchen and started pouring himself a glass of juice. "But Lewis could sleep, and I kinda thought that I should let him. A-anyway, I wanted to be by myself for a bit, s-so I went for a drive."

"What?" Skyler jumped in front of him, her eyebrows raised in panic. "Don't go for a drive alone at night!"

"It was fine, there was nobody around. I didn't go to any of the…dangerous places."

"No, please don't go anywhere alone, not at night!"

"I wanted to be alone. That was…the point."

"Not at night, no, Flynn, please, please no."

"Mom, it's OK!" He put his hand on her shoulder.

"I said that you could stay at Lewis's! That does not mean that you can wander the streets!"

"Seriously, Flynn, your mom knows what she's talking about," said Marie, sitting down on one of the bar stools. "There's a lot of criminals about."

"Yeah, well the criminals turned out to be in my own house all along, and after finding one living at the end of my hallway, I can't be too worried about the ones on the street!"

Silence. Flynn regretted what he'd said immediately. He looked between the two women, wondering what he'd walked into. "S-sorry. I didn't mean..."

"That's OK" said Skyler, rubbing his back. "Just please don't be alone at night. It's not safe." She looked at him, begging him with desperate eyes.

"O-OK."

"So Flynn," said Marie, leaning onto the counter. "Would you have preferred to know about all this sooner, or later?"

Skyler's head whipped around. "Marie!"

"Wh-what do you mean?"

"I mean, for you, in general, for your life, bearing in mind that it was always going to be horrible no matter when you found out about it, would you rather have found out sooner -"

"Marie!"

"- and have been affected by it for longer, or to find out now, when it came to a head?"

"F-find out about dad, you mean?"

"Yeah. Your mother here says she was very jealous of the blissful ignorance that we were all living in."

"Which cannot now be changed, Marie! What's the point in talking about it?"

"Oh, there's a lot of point, it always helps to talk things out."

"S-sooner," said Flynn. "Definitely sooner. It m-makes me sick to think of all the things...I did…for Dad, all the times I helped him, when th-the whole time he was just lying and m-manipulating Mom and me, and…and undermining Uncle Hank's job. And then… he betrayed us all and k-killed Uncle Hank and Agent Gomez, and if…I'd kn-known about it sooner, I woulda tried to s-stop that."

Skyler gripped the edges of the island counter, looking down, her eyes closed.

"W-what I hate the most, though, is… I didn't see it. I kn-knew there was something wrong between Mom and Dad, and… I kept t-taking Dad's side over and over. I n-never once looked at Mom and thought, 'W-why is she so upset?' I just…didn't even n-notice it. Th-that's what really m-makes me s-sick to my stomach, knowing that I…took h-his side."

Skyler looked up, shaking her head. "You're very young, Flynn. You don't have to think about that kind of thing until you're older – when you are older, you'll be able to tell more about what other people are feeling, but even then, Aunt Marie couldn't pick what was going on with me either. That was just me, I just closed off from everybody… Nobody could pick that."

"I c-could've asked you!"

"No. That's not your job."

"D-Dad just…acted like nothing was w-wrong all the time. There was," he held up a finger, "o-one time when I…saw him get u-upset. But other than that he was just…just…l-laughing all the time. And y-you weren't, and he just didn't care. I h-hate myself for not s-seeing through him."

"No!" Skyler took him in her arms. "No, honey, nobody could see through him! He was living two lives and he was very good at hiding everything, but the life that you were in, everything that you saw, he was just your dad, and he loved you and took care of you, and that's all you should've seen."

Marie scoffed.

"What?" said Skyler harshly.

"He took care of him, really?"

"You do remember what Walt used to be, right? For the other 15 years of Flynn's life, when he was a good father?"

"Well, all over now. I don't get it, you know, how he can change into this complete…other person, I mean, was he hiding this all along, or was he just pretending to be someone else back then?"

Skyler spun around. "Hey! This is not helping!"

"I'm just saying, I've been wondering that – Flynn probably has too."

"He was not hiding this all along. He changed, it happens."

"Yeah, but it takes a certain kind of person to do that. He must have had some tendency or some drive that was always there -"

"Marie -"

"- to be able to run a drug empire, order hits on people, con your entire family, lie to everybody, exploit and manipulate very close members of your family – yes I'm including you in that, Skyler, because I'm trying to understand you – and to blackmail and then murder a close family member! That's not something you can just 'change' and suddenly be able to do, I would not do any of that ever, no matter what 'circumstance' I was in, would you, Flynn?"

"N-no way."

"You just said he was laughing about it, he thought it was all OK. What kind of a person thinks that way?"

"Marie, enough," said Skyler, her eyes on her son, who was shaking with anger.

"Well how do you explain it, Skyler? I can see only two ways. Either he suddenly went stark raving mad, which doesn't add up given the cold, calculating way in which he's done what he's done, or for the entire preceding 18 years that we knew him he was hiding this dark side, secretly not giving a damn about other people or morality, and we just didn't notice because he liked us and was manipulating us into liking him back."

"NO, Marie, stop right now," said Skyler.

"It gives me the heebie jeebies thinking about it, those evil tendencies simmering away all those years."

"MARIE!"

Holly awoke, and started to cry. Skyler ran to her, and Flynn followed.

"Looks like you woke the baby, Skyler," sneered Marie.

Holly's screams were the only sound to be heard for some time. Skyler was finally able to calm her down by feeding her. Flynn sat beside his mother and put his arm around her. Marie looked on, feeling left out, hopeless and alone, and a little guilty. She believed every word she'd just said, but she realised she had neglected to consider the deep hold Walt must have had over her sister to make her do so many unforgivable things.

And then she remembered the talking pillow night, and how deeply Skyler, ultimately, loved him. As much as she loved Hank.

Hank. Marie's face rippled into tears, as it did every time she thought of him, every time she forgot. The others didn't notice, but the feeling rapidly got worse, and Marie got up and ran to the bathroom. She didn't make it all the way there, collapsing into tears on the floor of Walt and Skyler's bedroom.

"Wh-why is Holly's crib in the living room?" Flynn said quietly.

"Long story," Skyler replied, yawning. She leaned back on the sofa and closed her eyes, finally snatching a few precious moments of sleep.

Flynn sat beside her, thinking, and trying, trying to understand.


	4. Chapter 4

When Skyler awoke, the sun had risen. She could hear the gurgling and giggling of her daughter, and her son saying, "Peekaboo." For a moment, she forgot about everything. She opened her eyes and saw them, and for a moment, she felt a shadow of happiness. Just for one moment.

Then she remembered. Grunting, she looked around. "How long was I out?"

Flynn shrugged. "M-maybe twenty minutes," he replied.

"Do you want something to eat?" Placing Holly in Flynn's arms, Skyler got up. "Where's your Aunt Marie?"

Flynn looked up. "I-I dunno, first I thought she was…in the bathroom, but…s-she's been gone a while."

"Marie?" Skyler walked along the hallway. "Where are you?"

She heard a click at the end of the hall, and walked to her bedroom door to find that it was locked. Thinking of the masked men who'd been in that bedroom only hours ago, Skyler's heart jumped into her throat. "Marie!" She rattled the door. "Are you alright, what's going on?" Then she remembered the kids in the living room, and she'd started to run back towards them when she heard a muffled sob coming from the bedroom.

Skyler's feet judded to a halt, her eyes on the kids, slowly becoming aware of what was and wasn't happening. If those men had wanted to kill her and Holly, they would have done it last night. And they wouldn't have worn masks. The noises coming from her bedroom now told of a very different problem, and the sound made her heart break.

"Hey Marie," she said gently, trying the door again and then, when there was no response, sinking to sit on the floor. "I'm sorry about before, I just want you to be careful about what you say to Flynn. Although, I…well, it kinda hit a nerve for me too, so… That's not the issue here, though, is it?"

Marie was lying on the floor just the other side of the door. She had been sobbing hysterically about Hank, then gradually it had ceased, but then when Skyler came she started sobbing hysterically about Skyler. Her sister, with whom she had shared everything in her entire life. Whom she'd told everything, always. Who'd not only not told her something, she'd used blackmail on her husband and then caused his death. Marie didn't know if their relationship could survive this, but if it didn't, she'd be truly alone, and that terrified her.

Skyler didn't know if their relationship would survive this either. She knew there was nothing she could say or do to make it better. She'd felt powerless before, plenty of times. Powerless to stop Walt, powerless to protect her children, but she'd never before felt powerless to make things better in any small way. There was not one single thing she could do, ever, to fix this. Nothing would bring Hank back.

"I want you to be able to say whatever you want to me. I want to…just take it, whatever you wanna say, if you wanna scream insults at me, or… Anything that… I mean, I deserve it, so… And you asked me a few things before that I haven't answered - some of them I can't answer, because I don't know, I don't know…how I could do such things. But you said you want to know why, and I wanna try to…I can never explain it in a way that will satisfy you or will make anything better, because I can't even understand it myself…but I wanna tell you the truth, Marie. You have a right to know it, and you have a right to yell at me. A lot.

"The only thing I would ask is that you not do it in front of Flynn. Don't put him in the middle of us, it's not fair on him. And anyway, I don't think I can… Well what happened before just demonstrated that I can't be fully honest with you when he's there. Innate tendencies? Sure, I got buckets on Walt's innate tendencies that I can share with you, but I don't want Flynn to think that about his father.

"It's hard for me too, because I've been married to Walt for almost 18 years...and for the majority of it I was really happy with him. And, you know, one of the reasons why I went crazy and did all this horrible stuff, especially at the end…is that I love him. I hate him too, and I know he's treated me terribly, but I can't turn off those earlier feelings – I've tried, God I have tried, you have no idea. But you can't stop loving somebody who's been that central in your life, who's meant that much to you for so long, and he…he was always my rock and my soulmate and I was just crazy about him – you remember. So now I have to hate him and love him at the same time, and that's hell for me. And it's hell for Flynn too because it's his father, he can't get another one of those, you know! Walt will always be the man who raised him and that he looked up to and… So don't say stuff about Walt in front of Flynn, please, I mean he needs to talk some stuff out, so he will probably say some stuff to you, and if he does, that's OK, I mean, engage with him on that, but will you…can you let him drive it, please, can you do that, please? With me, fine, no problem, when it's just you and me, you can say whatever you want, you can yell and scream and say horrible things about Walt, about both of us…I owe you that.

"You also have a right to…never talk to me again. I think given the circumstances that would be very reasonable. I thought it was very big of you to come here tonight, I was very grateful. And I was so glad that you cried in my arms, because -" Skyler's voice broke. "Because I really wanna help you through this, Marie!"

Silence returned, Skyler sitting on the floor crying quietly, Marie laying on her back looking up at the ceiling, blinking and breathing.

Flynn changed Holly's diaper, opened all the curtains, and then his stomach rumbled, so he decided to make breakfast. He looked in the fridge and realised there weren't any eggs. The whole fridge looked a bit…not bare, but more spacious somehow, because there was less food in it. It wasn't like his mother to not keep it fully stocked, but then the past few days had been far from ordinary. He figured she hadn't had time, and decided to offer to go to the grocery store later in his car. Meantime, he found pancake mix, which he didn't really know how to make, but he figured he'd give it a try. Moving about and doing things made him feel better. And he wanted to help his mother and aunt so very badly.

"Are you still there?" Marie's voice came through the door for the first time.

"Yeah," Skyler sniffed.

"Good."

Flynn heard a noise outside, but didn't react, concentrating hard on the pan and the two egg flips he was using to flip small, broken, oddly shaped pancakes about. At first he thought the noise was the garbage truck, but it stopped outside the house for some time, and then the engine stopped and he heard men's voices. He looked around, but couldn't make out what they were saying, and he needed to focus on the pancakes.

Then he heard a different noise, kind of a clunk, and looking around, the men came into his line of vision through the front window. They were standing around his car, they were touching his car, and then all of a sudden, his car began to move backwards.

"What?" he said loudly. "Hey!" He began to move towards the front door as fast as his legs and his crutches would carry him. "M-Mom!"

Skyler jumped up and ran along the corridor.

"S-someone's taking my car!" Flynn reached the front door. Yanking it open, he hurtled through it, yelling, "Hey! Hey! That's m-my car! W-what are you doing?"

Skyler stopped, her body falling against the wall, her face in her hands. The bedroom door opened, and Marie came out. "What's going on?" she asked.

"They're repossessing the cars."

"Oh."

Skyler smelled burning. She ran to the stove and turned off the heat. The pancakes were smoking.

"Did you warn Flynn about this?" asked Marie.

Skyler shook her head. She lifted Holly out of her playpen. "Thanks, Walt!" she said, striding towards the door. "Give your son his dream car and then take it away _twice_!"

Marie followed.

Skyler paused at the top of the path, looking at her son with an expression of pure heartbreak. He was arguing with the men, so passionately that his stutter was barely bothering him. "But it's mine!" he was yelling, "I know it's in my dad's name, but I'm sixteen, I can p-put it in my name, can't I, Mom? _I'll_ make the repayments, I know my dad can't anymore, b-but I think it's a bit soon for you to take it, I…I mean, it's only been a few days, and… _I'll_ make the repayments!"

Skyler put her arm around his shoulder, squeezing.

"I-I'll get a job, Mom, and I can do it."

Skyler shook her head. "It's not because of that, sweetie. I'm sorry."

The Challenger was now fully on the tray of the truck, and the men started clipping it in. Breaking away from his mother, Flynn rushed towards them. "H-how much is it per week? I'll get a job. J-just give me time! When did Dad make the last payment?"

"Flynn, it's not because of the repayments. I am so sorry. There is a federal law that says that you cannot profit from crime, and all money that comes from crime and all things that were bought with it are taken away. They'll take my car too."

Flynn looked at his mother in horror, and then back at his car, realising that the men had left it on the truck and were now attaching their winch to the back of Skyler's car. One of them approached Skyler, handing her some documents.

"This acknowledges that these two vehicles have been seized by the Federal Government under the Proceeds of Crime Act. You don't need to sign anything because we don't need your consent, but is there anything inside the vehicles that you would like to remove?"

"Uh, yes please," said Skyler, accepting the papers and handing Holly to Marie. She walked towards her car.

"What about you, son?" said the man. He looked at Flynn and at his crutches, and said, "Ah, why don't you give me your keys and tell me what you'd like to get out of the vehicle?"

"I'll get it," said Flynn, frowning.

"Ah, the truck has a narrow – stick to the -"

Flynn was already off up the ramp.

"We accept no liability for injuries caused while you are on our truck!" the man yelled.

At that moment, a black SUV pulled up, and two men in suits got out. Skyler recognised the DEA Prosecutor, and the other man was an agent who had intervieinterer only the previous day. He nodded awkwardly to Marie, saying hello, as the prosecutor approached Skyler, who was now standing in the driveway holding a notebook, three pens, a usb cord and the cradle of Holly's car seat. The man from the haulage company was holding out his hand, as Skyler gave him the key. "The spare is inside," she said. "Just give me a minute."

Turning around, she almost ran into the prosecutor, a deep feeling of dread balling in the pit of her stomach. She thought she knew why he was there. But she didn't want to believe it.

He stepped back. "Go and get the key, Mrs White," he said. "Your son's, as well, do you know where his spare key is?"

"Yes, they're together," said Skyler, disappearing into the house.

"Your husband's too, please!" he called after her.

"Have you found Walt's car?" Marie asked the other agent.

"No, but if they had his spare key and went around pushing the button on some dirt roads, it might help," he replied.

"That's all you've got? Really?" Marie turned to the prosecutor. "What's that?" she said, pointing at the document.

"I haven't served it yet, ma'am," he replied. "We can discuss it after."

"Not the house," she said. "They've lived here for over sixteen years – the _house_ is legitimate. Not the cars, no, sure, but…. It's not the house, is it? Is it the carwash?"

"We seized that on Sunday, Mrs Schrader," said the agent.

"Not the house," Marie repeated. "What about the kids? You're going to turf an entire family onto the street?"

Skyler returned, and handed three car keys to the prosecutor. "Which one is your husband's?" he asked, and Skyler pointed. He handed that one to the agent and the other two to the haulage man, who turned in the direction of a commotion that was happening on the tray of the truck. One of his men was trying to pull open the door of the Challenger, which Flynn had climbed inside. "Just let me sit here for a minute!" Flynn was yelling. "For a m-minute, OK?"

Skyler's eyes moistened. Marie turned to the agent. "It's John, right?"

"Jason," he replied.

"Jason, sorry," said Marie. "Listen, Jason, the house is legitimate, what Walt earned as a school teacher was legitimate, and what Skyler earned as a bookkeeper was legitimate. That's what paid for this house."

"It's…not up to me," said Jason, looking at the prosecutor. Marie turned around, and saw that he was now passing his document to Skyler, who was nodding gravely.

"Hey!" said Marie, striding towards them. "You can take the cars, but the _house_ is legitimate, and you have no authority to -"

"Actually, I do," said the prosecutor.

"On whose authority? The DEA's? Because the ASAC of the Albuquerque District Office would not stand for this, there are hundreds of thousands of _legitimate_ dollars that have gone into this house, paid for by _legitimate_ work done by -"

"Ma'am-"

"Jason? Jason! Come over here! You come over here and you tell him your ASAC would not agree to this, he did not sign off on this -"

"The DEA Albuquerque District Office doesn't have an ASAC, ma'am," said the prosecutor.

"I know," said Marie through clenched teeth. "And until they appoint a new one, _I_ speak for him."

"You're a civilian, ma'am," said the prosecutor.

"Whoah whoah whoah," said Jason, stepping toward his colleague. "This is ASAC Schrader's wife. A little respect."

Skyler had been distracted by what was going on on the tray of the truck, but she saw the men walk back down the ramp, apparently having agreed to give Flynn "a minute" with his car. Turning back, she became aware of what her sister was doing.

"A little respect – yes, a little _respect_ is what is needed here."

"Marie, don't," said Skyler, putting her arm around her sister.

"The order wasn't signed by the DEA, ma'am," the prosecutor explained. "It was signed by the Magistrate's Court of Bernalillo County. The mortgage records have been checked thoroughly by federal agents. Over the past two years there have been several payments made in cash and some with cheques from a company called Ice Station Zebra Associates – the assets of that company have also now been seized because the company was recently found to be involved in money laundering. And for the past eleven months," he continued, "all payments were drawn directly from the business profits of A1A Carwash, which she has admitted," he pointed at Skyler, "was a money laundry."

Marie swallowed, turning to Skyler, who kept looking straight ahead. The prosecutor turned to her. "You have 30 days, Mrs White." She nodded, and he and the agent got back into their car and drove away.

Skyler looked down at the document in her hand, sighed, folded it up and placed it in her pocket.

"How are you so calm?" asked Marie.

Skyler pulled her close. "Thank you."

"Alright, son, you've had your five minutes!" The truck supervisor was standing on the sidewalk looking up at the Challenger. "Out you get!" One of his colleagues in the cab switched on the mechanism that retracted the ramp. "Whoah whoah whoah!" he said. "How's the kid going to get down?" The guy in the cab shrugged. The ramp retracted and the tray kept rising. "He's got a disability, you idiot! How's he going to get down?"

The door of the Challenger opened. "I'm _fine_ to get down, thank you," said Flynn with exaggerated sarcasm. He placed two CDs, a sunglasses case, a joystick, four computer games, a phone charger and a chocolate bar onto the tray of the truck, then leaned into the back of the car to grab a fleece jacket. "Y-you can keep the trash," he said bitterly. Then he shuffled to the cab end of the truck tray and, leaning on the cab, manoeuvred himself into a sitting position. His mother held out her hand to him, but he didn't take it, deftly placing first his crutches and then his legs onto the ground, and then turning back to his possessions. Marie stepped forward and picked up the CD and game cases. She tried to grab the other things, too, but he said, "I'm fine!" and proceeded to put them all into his pockets in a sluggish manner. When he was done, he held his hand out to Marie, demanding the CDs and games back. He put them into the back pockets of his jeans, and, without another look at anybody, he walked sullenly back into the house.

"Ma'am, do you have insurance for the damage to the front bumper?" asked the haulage supervisor, pointing at the Ford.

"You're kidding me."


	5. Chapter 5

Skyler and Marie stepped back into the house. Neither said anything. Marie looked around the once happy living room, realising that the child in her arms would not grow up here as her brother had, and that unlike her brother, she would have no father or uncle. This was us now, she thought. These three broken people were all Holly had.

Skyler walked listlessly to the stove and began to clear up the mess of the burnt pancakes. When this was done, she looked in the fridge, noting that the bottle of milk in there was less than half full. Returning to the counter, she took the remainder of Flynn's pancake mix and added some water, stirring it through. Using this, she was able to make 5 pancakes, of which she put three on one plate and two on another. Glancing across at her sister, she spread raspberry jam on both pancake stacks, and shook a few blueberries from a bag in the freezer. She carefully placed a dollop of low fat yoghurt on top. Taking a fork and spoon from a drawer, she took the two stack plate over to her sister, placing it on the coffee table in front of her.

"Would you mind looking after Holly for now?" she asked gingerly. "I gotta…" She gestured in the direction of Flynn's room.

"Sure. You don't have to ask that."

"Thanks." Skyler swallowed.

Skyler grabbed the other plate and a bottle of chocolate sauce, and walked down the hall.

Knocking on the door elicited no reply, so Skyler opened the door and went in. Flynn was in front of the computer with his headphones on, playing a particularly violent fist fighting computer game. He was punching a tall reptilian character over and over again.

Skyler placed a hand on his shoulder and held out the plate of pancakes. He scowled up at her, but his hunger got the better of him and he paused the game and accepted the pancakes, pouring chocolate sauce liberally over them. He kept the headphones on, and they played the game's title music over and over.

Skyler sat down on the bed and watched him silently. Eventually, the headphone cord got in the way of Flynn's fork and he tore the headphones off his head and threw them to the floor angrily.

Skyler continued to sit, her heart thumping as, for the third time in as many days, she tried to formulate words that would break her son's heart.

"Flynn, I-"

"Wh...what was the point of it, then?" He looked at her for the first time, his eyes flashing. "If we d...don't even get to keep what he bought us, when he destroyed...our lives and our family for n-no reason other than that he's a greedy asshole, and he b...bought me a car to t...try and buy my love, to m-manipulate me into doing what he...wanted me to do and thinking what he...wanted me to think, while he fucked up everything behind my back when I wasn't...looking, and now, after going through...all that shit, I-I don't even get to keep the car? So like, what was the point, I mean, if a...all along the police are just going to t...take all your stuff when they find out, then w...what's the point even t-trying to be a criminal?"

"Yeah, well said."

"WHAT WAS THE POINT?" Flynn took another bite off his pancakes, sullenly.

"No point at all," Skyler nodded. "Unfortunately by the time I found out about it, a lot of things had already been compromised, he used the money to pay for our bills, including the house, I mean the mortgage, and... That was one of the reasons I stayed silent. I didn't want us to lose… all of this." She sighed.

"So f...forgive me, I mean, d...did I miss something here, because I...I thought that...Dad was s...supposed to be smart!"

Skyler nodded. "He thought he was smart enough not to get caught."

"Y...you're supposed to be smart too! And yet you l...let this happen! You're so stupid, you l-let him buy you a car too! And you knew what was happening, s-so what's your excuse? I'm 16 and I w-wanted a Challenger because it's cool and h...having a cool car is all that matters w-when you're 16, I di...didn't have to think about anything else b...because I'm 16, that's my excuse, w-what's your excuse?"

"I don't have an excuse."

"I-if you'd kept your old car, I could...drive it to school right now!"

"We can ask Aunt Marie to-"

"No, L...Lewis is coming to get me because Lewis is great, he's not...stupid like you!"

Skyler looked at her watch. Lewis used to collect Flynn at 8:15, and it was now ten past. She scrunched her eyes shut. "Flynn, honey, will you come home tonight please? There's something we need to talk about."

"A...are you going to tell me the truth for once?"

Skyler nodded sadly. "Yep."

"O...oh really. You're going to tell me the...truth."

"Yeah, I will. Just come home."

"Good," Flynn said with finality, standing up and carrying his backpack and empty plate to the kitchen. When he got there, there was a knock at the door. Marie opened it, to be confronted with a very awkward-looking Lewis.

"Hi, Mrs Schrader," Lewis said awkwardly. "I… I was just so sorry to hear…."

"Thank you." Marie smiled emptily.

Flynn barrelled towards them, the scowl still firmly attached to his face. He hugged Marie, then disappeared through the door.

Marie turned to see Skyler standing at the edge of the kitchen, looking at the now closed door.

"Lewis jumped to the task quickly!" said Marie.

"Yeah," said Skyler sadly. She collected Marie's plate and began to wash the dishes.

Silence for a while. Marie watched her sister, realising for the first time that she was in far worse a situation than herself. Somehow, this thought served to confuse her even more.

"Why didn't you go with him?" she asked.

"Well it was time for school, and…he's upset enough about the car, I'll tell him about the house later."

"No, I mean... I mean Walt, why didn't you go...with Walt?"

Skyler turned suddenly, looking at Marie in shock. "What?"

"Well, I mean, the two of you were running this illegal business together... You got found out, game over, so he ran for the hills... Why didn't you?"

Skyler rested her suds-covered hands on the counter to steady herself. "What do you mean?"

"The alternative is all your stuff gets taken and you get thrown in prison. Why didn't you run?"

Skyler raised a hand and drew a deep breath. "Firstly, I was not running a business with him. I was not part of it, I was not…" her eyes and her hand fell as she realised that that was exactly what she was doing.

"You were helping him. You had a choice, you could choose to help Hank or to help Walt, and you chose Walt. Which given that you're married to him is fair enough, I suppose. I might have done the same. I'm just wondering why you didn't follow through and go with him."

Marie wasn't speaking sarcastically, not meanly. She was genuinely wondering. And Skyler realised the given the choices she had made in the past, it was a fair thing to wonder. She had chosen Walt. She had compromised herself, destroyed her relationship with her family, and committed herself to prison. She must have thought, although it must have been somewhere deep down, a thought she did not remember having, that he was worth it. At least, she could see why her sister might think that she thought that.

"You think that of me?" she asked, afraid to hear the answer.

Marie shrugged. "You did everything else, why not that? Surely it'd be easier than staying here. Why didn't you run?"

"I wouldn't do that to you."

Marie looked through the counter hatch expressionlessly.

A tear fell down Skyler's cheek. "That's what you think of me? I've… compromised myself so much, I've done so many unforgivable things that you think that I would consider going with him when… aside from the fact that I wouldn't wanna uproot my kids like that, and condemn them to a life of running, I wouldn't wanna do that to them, or to myself when I never wanted any of it anyway, but… but when I had just found out that your husband died, do you think that I would leave you?" her voice broke. "No way."

"So you didn't even think…"

"No way."

Marie was silent as she searched her sister's eyes and found she was telling the truth. Skyler resisted the urge to vomit as she realised how low she had fallen. That her own sister would think she would even consider doing that. She knew, though. She knew exactly why Marie thought that.

Marie didn't know what to say. She felt relief, certainly. But she couldn't bring herself to say thank you. Eventually, she turned and went back to Holly. Skyler turned back to the dishes, washing them in a far jerkier manner than before. Then when she was done, the draining water had never sounded louder.

"Um. You can stay here as long as you like, but since the DEA haven't asked me to go in today, I was thinking I'd better look for a job. So I'm just going to go into Flynn's room and do some research on his computer. And print some resumes. Is that ok? You can stay or go or... Whatever you like."

Marie considered this. "Do you want to take my car?" she asked quietly.

"Oh no, no, no. That's not what I meant, I was just saying that I'm going to go use the computer now."

"Well you said you're going to print resumes, how are you going to hand them out without a car?"

"There are some that I can submit online. I need to do some research first, anyway."

"Nothing beats going and talking to people, though."

"Yeah, oh I know, so I'll print some resumes and go for a walk later, maybe take a bus downtown…."

"Just take my car, you will be able to go to a lot more places."

"I can't ask that of you."

"You're not asking, I'm offering. I don't want the kids to be on the street, you need to find a new house and to find a house you need money. Plus, you know, to feed the kids, I mean... Did the DEA freeze your accounts?"

"Yeah."

"And they took your business, so... Do you have any money at all now?"

"Not really."

"OK, so, take my car and go find a job. I'll watch Holly. She's gorgeous and she's making me feel just a little bit better."

Skyler looked at her sister, holding back tears.

"Go on, then." Marie continued matter-of-factually. "Go and print your resumes."

"Thank you," Skyler breathed.

Marie turned away, sitting on the floor next to Holly and holding out a toy to her.

Skyler stood for a moment, then turned and swept down the corridor.


	6. Chapter 6

Flynn's school life became hell in one way and cool in another. He hated when people stared at him and he hated when they made assumptions and he hated when they asked him questions…but he noticed that the cool kids, the kids that had bullied him throughout elementary school and middle school but mostly ignored him in high school, seemed to be giving him respect. One of them stood aside for him in the cafeteria line, and he caught another looking at him with a sense of awe. He saw some other kids doing that too. He didn't know how he felt about it, but mostly, he felt guilty.

He was called to the principal's office on Tuesday morning. Carmen invited him to sit on the sofa next to her and asked him how he was feeling.

"Pretty awful," was his response.

"I tried to call your mom a couple of times yesterday, but I couldn't get through."

"She's been at the DEA a lot."

"I can imagine."

"No you can't."

"Flynn, look at me."

Flynn reluctantly turned his head.

"We're all here for you. The school and the teachers and me. And Mrs Griego got in touch with you yesterday, didn't she, about arranging a counselling session?"

"Yeah."

"We are all here for you, whatever you need, just ask. But as principal there's something else I have to think about, I have to be here for the other students too. And your dad was a teacher here for a long time. I think right now a lot of his former students are very confused."

Carmen paused, looking searchingly at the boy, trying to get an inkling of how best to put this, but he was looking straight ahead, his face set into a scowl that it wasn't letting anyone else in.

"We're going to have a school assembly tomorrow afternoon. Like we did for Wayfarer 515, do you remember? It's for the school and the students because he worked here, and... They have a lot of questions. What you're feeling might be in the same as them or it might be different. I thought I'd tell you about this now so that you can have a think about it overnight, maybe talk about it with your mom, and you can decide whether you want to attend or not. It's up to you."

Flynn sighed sullenly. "My name's going to come up, right? Th-the whole school's talking about me."

"Well I would like to take the chance to tell them not to gossip and to make sure they treat you and your family with respect. So yes, your name will come up. You can talk to the school yourself if you want to. But if you don't want to be there, I will say something very small to the effect that the other students should respect your right to privacy and give you as much support as they can. Other than that, the assembly will just be about Mr White. Not about you."

Carmen paused again. "What do you think, Flynn? Is that OK with you?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"Well, you are the only student I am giving a free pass not to attend this assembly. But if you want to come, you can sit up the front with us, or you can sit with your friends, or you can hide in the back. You can talk or you can listen. Up to you."

….

Flynn returned home before Skyler did. He found his aunt asleep on the sofa with Holly in her arms. He went into the kitchen to make himself a snack. Looking in the fridge, he realised there was barely any cheese left. Looking in the freezer, he found a frozen TV dinner and heated it up.

When the microwave beeped, Marie stirred. Flynn leaned on the island counter eating his food, and frowning.

Marie looked around. "Flynn?"

"Oh, s-sorry, Aunt Marie, I didn't mean to wake you."

"No problem." she yawned. "I don't know who fell asleep first, me or your sister."

Flynn came to sit on the armchair as Marie sat up. "Where's M-Mom?" he asked.

"Job hunting," said Marie. "I leant her my car."

"Oh, th-thank you. And th-thank you for being here, I'm...so glad you're here."

"Thanks, sweetie. I don't know what to do. I realised that our family is just us now, so... I don't have anywhere else to go, or anyone else to be with."

"Y-you can come here anytime. Or I can…go there, to your house, I-I mean if you don't want to be alone. Just t-tell me what I can do to help."

"Thank you." Marie smiled with her mouth but not her eyes. "What are you eating?"

"S- some kind of frozen lasagne. It's n-not very good. I wanted to make grilled cheese, b-but there isn't enough cheese. I was going to go to the supermarket today, b-but I...lost the car, so."

"That's something I want to talk to you about. Your mother doesn't have any money. The DEA has taken everything. Until she finds a job, she doesn't have anything, so…" Marie paused and took a $50 note as her wallet. "Here. Go and get some groceries. I'd give that to her directly but I don't think she'd accept it."

"W-wow...thank you, Aunt Marie."

"I know you still don't have a car, but can Lewis take you? Or I will."

"Th-thank you. But a-aren't you mad at Mom?"

"I am, but that doesn't mean I want her to starve. Especially not you and Holly. But I don't think she'd let that happen, I think she'd feed the two of you and starve herself. I did not see her eat breakfast this morning, but she made pancakes for you and me. You have to watch that, ok? Make sure she eats."

Holly awoke, blinked, and looked around. "Mama?" she said.

"Hi, Holly," cooed Marie. "Mama's not here right now, but she'll be back soon."

Holly's body tensed as she continued to look around.

"Let's get you something to eat," said Marie, carrying the child to the kitchen. "Has she been OK?" she asked Flynn. "Any more nightmares or screaming?"

"I don't know," he replied. "I haven't been here."

"Oh, look, Holly, you've still got leftovers from your lunch, haven't you! Look at what we've got here, let's just heat it up…"

Holly continued fussing until she was sitting in her high chair being handed a spoon by Marie. Even then, she continued to cry out until Marie had moved the chair so that Holly could clearly see herself, Flynn and the door. Finally she ate, but her eyes kept roaming the room.

"Aunt Marie," said Flynn, and paused.

"Yeah?"

"W-what do...H-how much do you know about...what Mom and Dad did? H-how much was him and how much...was her?"

"I've been wondering that myself. When I first found out, I thought 90/10. Then her subsequent actions made me think it was 60/40, then 50/50...but now...now I think it was about 70/30. Maybe 80/20. We hope it was 80/20, don't we?"

"Y-yeah."

"The DEA have charged her with money laundering, profiting from a felony, concealing a felony and concealing a felon. But they haven't charged her with drug dealing or with anything connected to that, so... I think that was all him, and I think she was just trying to clean up after him, trying to make things better, well she said she was trying to protect us from the evil knowledge and keep our family together, so. She's always been like that, she'll try to take charge of a situation because she thinks she can fix it somehow. And sometimes she can and other times she can't. But the problem is that she won't tell anyone else what she's doing. She'll never ask for help."

Flynn sat forward in his chair, trying to come to terms with the news that his mother had been charged.

"Did she tell you she'd been charged?"

He shook his head. "Th-they were talking about it at school, though, s-so I know about it."

Marie nodded. "You see, if she doesn't tell you things, you find out in worse ways. She didn't tell me either. The DEA did."

Holly pushed her bowl aside, beginning to fuss again. Marie grabbed a wet wipe and began to clean the child's face and arms. This was difficult to do, because Holly kept snapping her head away, looking around the room, and jiggling her feet.

"Mama will be back soon, Holly, I promise. Just hang tight, ok?" she took a small chocolate out of her handbag and passed it to Holly. "There you go! Chocolate fixes everything." She picked Holly up and walked back over to the sofa. "Well. Almost everything."

"W-what does it mean?"

"The fact that they've charged her? I think it means they're finished with her for now. They can still compel her to come in for questioning whenever they need to ask her something, but I get the impression she couldn't tell them very much. Because your father kept everything to himself. So they were disappointed in the amount of information she could give them, which unfortunately means that she doesn't have any information to trade, so when the trial and the sentencing comes about, it… I suppose it could be good for her and it could be bad for her. They definitely want to throw the book at her because she's the only part of this whole Heisenberg thing that they have access to right now, because they stuffed up their job so very badly that they couldn't arrest a single one of the people that did this. Apart from her. And two agents have been killed, so if they don't find your father, she's going to be the scapegoat for that. But on the other side of the coin, the fact that she doesn't know much makes her seem more innocent, it makes it seem like she wasn't a major part of the operation. Like it was only 80/20 it wasn't 50/50. And maybe she didn't even really know what she was doing or what she was allowing to happen. How serious it was. I hope that's the case, anyway. Both because that would mean the jury would go easy on her, and because it would mean that we can...have a chance to recover."

There was the sound of keys turning in the lock, and Skyler appeared. Holly squealed, and held out her arms to her. It was more a squeal of relief than delight. Skyler took her into her arms, holding out a set of car keys to Marie.

"Thank you so much," she said. "I was able to get to 15 different places in three districts. And to the supermarket."

Placing 3 supermarket bags on the counter, she brought Holly back over to Flynn, kissing him on the cheek and saying, "Just a second, I'm just going get out of these clothes." Holly had already put chocolatey fingers all over Skyler's business shirt, but now her arms gripped tighter and she began to cry.

"I-I think she wants to stay w-with you, Mom," said Flynn.

"Yep, she does," said Skyler, holding the child close and rubbing her back as she walked to her bedroom. Her eyes shone deep with worry, but only after she had turned her back on Flynn and Marie.

"What happens now?" Flynn continued. "I mean there, there'll be a…"

"A what?"

"A trial."

"Yep, yeah there will, but it won't be for a while."

"How long?"

"Oh, a year, 18 months, something like that."

"Wh-where's Dad in all this? Why can't he just...be a man and face it? He-he's left Mom high and dry. E-even Lewis said that."

"Yeah." Marie nodded angrily. "Be a man. He's not a man at all, he's a cockroach." Remembering what Skyler had asked her to do regarding Flynn, she stopped herself from saying more. Her mouth became a hard line, sealed shut.

After a few moments, she drew a breath and turned to her nephew. "I'd better go."

"Won't you stay for dinner?"

Marie shook her head. "No. I'd better go." she stood up.

"A-are you sure? We could h-have dinner together. A-as a family."

"No thank you, honey." Marie hugged him tightly. "Look after your sister. Call me if you need me."

"Yeah, s-same goes. P-please call us if you need anything. All you have to do is ask. Actually y-you don't have to ask, because I will be there for you n-no matter what, all the time. I kn-know I go away to Lewis's sometimes, but j-just call me anytime, because I wanna do anything I can to help you."

"Thank you, Flynn." Marie cupped his cheek, and with tears in her eyes, she turned and walked out the door.

Skyler was sitting on the floor of her bedroom with Holly, stroking her hair and talking to her, doing whatever she could to reassure the child of her own continued presence. She heard the front door close, and she jumped up.

"Did Aunt Marie leave?" she asked Flynn.

"Yeah, I-I asked her to stay for dinner, but-"

Skyler was gone out the door. "Marie! Marie, wait."

Marie was about to close her car door, but she held it open just a little. Skyler leaned towards her. "Thank you… for today, and last night, and everything."

"You're welcome," said Marie quietly, not making eye contact.

"I… if… if you need anything, call me. Any time of the day or night, just call, if you want to talk or yell at me or...anything, just call."

Marie nodded curtly, turning to look at Holly. "You look after her, ok? She's not right."

"No." Skyler closed her eyes. "She's not. You… you said something about a child psychologist?"

"I'll make an appointment."

"I… I can't…"

"I'll pay for it."

"I-" Skyler began, then stopped. "Thank you, I'll pay you back."

"With what?"

Silence. Skyler looked at her sister in hope, anxiety, guilt and extreme trepidation.

"You paid for Hank's medical bills anyway," said Marie, turning to meet Skyler's eyes for the first time with a measured glare.

"That-that wasn't with any thought of payback or… or any agenda, there was no-"

"Just cos families look after each other, right?" Marie continued to glare.

"Yeah. I promise you, that's all it was. I wanted to help."

"That better be all it was." Marie started the engine.

"I swear."

"I'll make the appointment." Marie shut the door and put the car in reverse.

"I swear," Skyler whispered, watching her drive away. "I only wanted to help."


	7. Chapter 7

Wednesday morning was sluggish. Skyler and Flynn had nothing to say to each other. Flynn stirred his cereal around and around. He was barely halfway through it when he heard the car horn that indicated Lewis had arrived outside. Patting Holly on the head and touching his mother's shoulder briefly, he turned for the door.

"Wait, Flynn," said Skyler, standing up and handing him a banana from the half full fruit bowl. "You've barely eaten."

"Thanks, see you later," he said expressionlessly, and went through the door.

Skyler cleared away the plates and stepped outside for a cigarette. She left the door ajar and made sure Holly was as close to it as possible on the other side. Holy watched her intently through the glass. Skyler closed her eyes.

When she was done, she stubbed the cigarette out on the door frame and brought the butt into the kitchen trash can. Picking Holly up, she went to Flynn's room and turned on his computer. She checked job ads again, writing down notes and ideas. Then she opened Craigslist and .

There was a knock at the door. Skyler sighed, thinking it was probably the DEA. She closed the internet browser, not wanting them to think she had any spare cash to buy a car. She didn't really. She'd stashed some cash around the house after Gus Fring threatened her family. She told herself it was insurance from Walt. It wasn't much, because she'd never wanted the scale of money that he did, she just wanted to make sure she could still feed her family if they had to go on the run, or if they suddenly lost a breadwinner or got found out by the police...or both.

During the search warrants, the DEA found all of her stashes except one, $5,000 inside the motor of an old food processor she never used. That $5,000 was now all she had.

She opened the front door to find Carmen standing there awkwardly.

"Hi, Skyler," she said, and smiled. "Can I come in?"

"Sure," Skyler replied, stepping back from the door. "Did I have a missed call from you?"

"Yeah, but that's OK, it's best to talk face to face anyway."

"What's going on? Is Flynn ok?"

"Oh yeah, he's fine. He's going to all his classes and doing as well as can be expected in the circumstances."

"Good." Skyler shifted from foot to foot, still looking worried. She rubbed Holly's back absently.

"Parents spend a lot of time worrying about their kids, don't they?" Carmen stepped around to the sofa and sat down on it.

Skyler nodded. "Yeah. You can say that again."

Carmen smiled, looking up at Skyler, who hadn't moved from her position by the door. "Actually, I'm not here to talk about Flynn," she said.

"Ah." Skyler nodded. "Do you want a drink?"

"Sure, thank you," said Carmen.

Skyler put Holly in her playpen, walked to the kitchen and turned the coffee maker on.

"We're having a school assembly this afternoon about Walt. You might've heard about it from Flynn."

"No, I haven't."

"OK. I told him about it yesterday to give him some warning, I told him it's up to him whether he attends or not. I suggested he discuss it with you last night."

"Well, last night I had to tell him that we're losing our house. So we had other things on our minds."

"Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that."

Silence. The coffee machine gurgled.

"I'm sorry, I should have thought to bring you some pamphlets, we've got a wealth of information on financial assistance programs, and also single parent support."

Skyler breathed deeply as she poured the coffee, not sure whether to feel angry at Carmen for being so patronisingly charitable or relieved that she had assumed they were losing the house for financial reasons, and not because the feds were taking it.

"I'll send some pamphlets home with Flynn."

"Thanks," said Skyler expressionlessly as she joined Carmen in the living room, handing her a cup of coffee and sitting down in the armchair with her own.

"Skyler, I want to start by saying that I am so sorry about what's happened to your family. I've told Flynn that the school will support him every step of the way, and I hope you have someone to support you too. The reason for my coming today is not that, though, but I want to make it clear that I do feel for what you're going through and that I don't intend to accuse you of anything or judge you, or…"

Skyler swallowed, a barely audible scoff escaping her lips.

"I want to ask you about Walt. I have 1800 students dependent on me for leadership. They're very confused about what's happened. They want to talk it out and they want someone to explain it to them. And their parents are concerned, understandably, about the influence Walt may have had on them when he was teaching them, and that they may have been exposed to certain...undesirable ideals."

Skyler raised a finger. "Let me stop you right there. There have always been two sides to Walt. He was a good teacher, he was patient and he was passionate about the kids and what he was teaching them. At home, most of the time, he was a good father. He would help Flynn with his homework, he would change Holly's diaper, he never shirked his responsibilities, he never failed to show his love for them. And he never tried to expose them to any, as you say, 'undesirable ideals.' But then there was this other side to him. It was like a different part of his persona, of his brain. He could go to this other place in his head and do things that the first sight of him never used to allow him to do. I think it was always there somewhere, but it only came out after he got cancer. He changed then. But he kept living two lives, and in the one that you saw, and that all your students and their parents are worried about, he was the same as he always was… After he got cancer he developed this kind of alter ego that was dangerous. But never the twain shall meet. I saw it, but nobody else did. He kept it separate. He had two lives, and I was the only one from his first life who ever saw the second. It never entered his classroom."

"What about Jesse Pinkman? He was Walt's former student. At JP Wynne."

"Yeah, well, I don't know when Walt met up with him exactly but it was years after he graduated. He was some deadbeat who was already dealing drugs at that point. It was he who influenced Walt, not the other way around. It had nothing to do with the school."

Carmen took a long sip of a coffee and placed the mug on the copper coffee table, leaning towards Skyler. "The thing is, this other side of Walt that you talk about... I saw it. Not anything as dramatic as what you saw, I never imagined that he was doing _that_ , but I put him on extended leave for a reason. He'd become moody, volatile, he wasn't focusing on his job and he wasn't doing what was best for the students. I certainly hope he wasn't teaching them to make methamphetamine, I'm not suggesting that he was, but influence extends far further than that, it's far more complex, especially in the mind of a child. Any student who enjoyed being in his classes, or even those who didn't enjoy it, even students who didn't like him as a teacher have now had their opinion of him irrevocably changed by what's come out in the news this week, and while some of them feel betrayed and disgusted, others think what he did was cool. These are teenagers we're talking about. They're very open to influence from the adults around them, whether those adults intend to influence them or not."

"I'm not sure why you feel the need to tell me this. I'm very aware, having spent the past year trying to get my children the hell away from him, of the danger a man like that poses to children. He would never directly hurt them, he would never directly try to influence them in a negative way, but just doing what he did and associating with who he associated with put our entire family in danger, but I don't have time to worry about potential ethereal influences he may or may not have exerted on a bunch of teenagers because I'm about to lose my house and I need to spend today looking for a job, and if you don't mind I would rather get back to that now."

"You're right, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to tell you what you already know. Actually what you've already said helps me a lot, about there being two sides to Walt and the other side never appearing at JP Wynne High School. Is that how you came to terms with it, to think of him as if he were two different people? Never the twain shall meet, as you said."

"In your world, they didn't."

"That's good, thank you. The other thing I want to ask you is, I wonder if you wouldn't mind clearing up a few facts for me. The media has presented various conflicting information over the past few days, some of it quite outlandish, and I would like to give the students the true facts about what happened. If you can see your way clear to giving them to me."

"I'm the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. I can't talk about it."

"I won't give your name, and I certainly don't want to introduce any new information. But I would like to be able to rule out some of the more distressing things if they are, in fact, not true."

"Like what?"

"Like your brother-in-law."

Skyler looked away.

"Walt didn't really… kill him, did he?"

Skyler shrugged her shoulders. "Nobody knows."

"The news report said that he phoned his wife to say that he had arrested Walt...and then he wasn't heard from again. But Walt was seen by you and your children and then he escaped."

"I'm not allowed to talk about any of this, Carmen."

"I'm really sorry to do this, Skyler. I just want to be able to give the kids the truth."

"Get it from the DEA. They seem to be doing a press conference a day."

"I've spoken to them. They gave me a couple of media releases."

"Good for you. I can't give you anything more than they can."

"Flynn called 911. Is that true?"

"Yep."

Carmen nodded slowly. "I'm so sorry. Thank you for your time." She stood up.

Distracted, Skyler didn't react until Carmen was at the door. She jumped up. "Wait, um… Flynn, how, how's he seem? At school?"

"If I had to describe it in one word, I would say surly."

"He… he always adored his father, and then he had to call 911 on him. He only ever knew the first version of Walt and now he's trying to reconcile the two in his mind, and…"

"We'll do whatever we can to support him. We've got him in with the school counsellor, his first session was this morning, I think. He will have regular appointments for a while."

"In your assembly, don't… make sure you acknowledge the first version of Walt. That's all Flynn knew, it's all the other students knew, you can bash the second version all you want, but if you don't acknowledge the first one, you'll only hurt them. Flynn's already said that he hates himself for not having seen through it, for not having realised. But he never could have, because he only knew the first Walt. That's not his fault, it's just who he knew. You need to acknowledge that man that he knew, that they all knew. Walt before he changed."

Carmen nodded. "That's exactly what I needed, Skyler. Thank you."

….

Lewis's car pulled up outside Flynn's house and the two of them sat there for a moment. "Are you sure you don't want to come back to my place?" Lewis asked. "My parents don't mind, really. My mom said you can stay forever if you want. But then she would, because she thinks the sun shines out your ass."

Flynn giggled. "Nah, I- th-thank you, but I gotta take care of m-my mom."

"Sure, that's cool."

"Th-thank you for w...what you said in the assembly. I really appreciate it."

"No problem, man, I didn't even know you were there!"

Flynn got out of the car and unlocked the front door of the house. He went to his room, where he found his mother on his computer.

"Hey, Mom," he said.

Skyler stood up and hugged him. "I'm sorry I'm in here, honey, do you mind? The DEA took my computer, so…"

"D-did they?"

Skyler logged out of the job and car sites, quickly writing down the address of a car sales lot across town. Flynn sat down on the bed. "W-what are you doing?"

"I'm looking for a job and a car. Not in that order. I don't think I can get a job without a car. It's going to be really crappy because I have almost no money, which means that I can't afford to buy you one. I'm really sorry. But you can borrow mine. If I can manage to get one that actually goes for the money I have."

"Y-yeah, that's ok, d-don't worry about me. Lewis is happy to dr-drive me around. Are you... I mean, with the m-money thing, a-are you... I s-said the other day that I would get a job, and I want to do that, but I'm not quite sure how, s-so I was going to…ask the career counsellor at school."

Skyler was nodding. "Yes, thank you, honey, that's exactly what I was going to ask you to do. We're um… I don't have any income, so… Things are going to be pretty rough for the next few months. I'm looking for a job, but also we're going to have to find a new house, which means I'll have to pay rent. And I really... I'm paying for things using emergency money right now. That's all I have."

"O-OK, well I'll get a job then. "

"I'm really sorry."

"N-no, that's ok. I-I'll get right on that. C-can you help me write a r-resume?"

Skyler closed her eyes and squeezed his hands. "Of course. Thank you."

"L-let's do it now." Flynn sat down in front of the computer and opened a blank Word document.

"OK. Mine is on your desktop," said Skyler, sitting on the bed behind him. "If you want to take a look."

"C-cool, yeah." he opened it up. "Whoah, you used to work at Wendy's?"

"Yeah, that was my high school job."

"I-I don't have any work experience, though."

"That's ok, you're in high school, nobody expects you to have any experience. You can put down volunteer work and hobbies and grades... Skills… like that you're good with computers and good with people… and you could ask one of your teachers if they'd like to write a reference for you."

"What's a reference?"

"It's where someone who knows you says nice things about you to make you sound good."

"Cool! C-can you do that?"

"No, you can't have a family member as a referee, I'm too biased."

"Y-you were my boss at the carwash." Flynn smiled.

"Yeah, but we'd better not put that on there."

"I-it's not on yours either."

"No. It's not. So I just showed you mine to give you an idea of the layout and the sorts of things that go on there. Yours will have a smaller work experience and education section but it will have a bigger skills and interests section."

"OK." Flynn copied some of Skyler's headings into the new document and began to write. "C-can I put Flynn?" he asked. "I should put Flynn, right?"

"Yes. Yes you should."

The phone began to ring.

"You have a think, and start writing some things in. Things you like to do, things you're good at..." she patted his shoulders. "I'll be back."

Skyler answered the phone in the kitchen.

It was Marie. "9.30 Friday the 9th," she said briskly. "They didn't have anything earlier. So I googled early childhood trauma to try and figure out what we should do in the meantime, and that really freaked me out because the scope of the effects on a person's entire life that can come from something that happened at such an early age is just frightening, so I got really worried and then I asked Dave, and he said well she's not able to talk about it and she probably won't actually remember it as an actual memory, he thinks that her brain will probably repress the memory to protect her, but in the meantime she's got this kind of anxiety going on - anytime you're not in the room, she's looking around the room and she's looking for you, and she's anxious when you're not there, so the answer basically for now is that you just have to be there all the time for her. Especially when she's asleep, because when you wake up from sleeping, for a moment there you're not sure what's going on or where you are, and when it's a person so small who doesn't fully understand the world and where people are and that they continue to exist when they're not in the room with you - That's a problem with small children, apparently you have to reach a certain age before you can understand that when a person is not in front of you that they still exist somewhere else, that they haven't just vanished into nothing. It's a psychological thing children have to develop, there's a name for it Dave said, I forget, object something… object permanence. It's the understanding that an object or a person still exists in the world, even when you're not looking at them. Children develop that understanding anywhere up to the age of 2, so she may not have it yet, and if she doesn't then it's really scary for her when you're not there because it's like you've just ceased to exist. God, that would be so scary."

"This isn't separation anxiety, Marie."

"No, no, that's a different again, with separation anxiety you're not meant to run back to the child all the time and stay there every time they get upset, that doesn't work with separation anxiety, but that's not what she's got. She's suffering from trauma. And the way to not make that worse is to reassure her that though you did suddenly disappear from her on Saturday afternoon, when she was ripped away from you by her deranged father, that's not going to happen again. You need to reassure her that that is never going to happen again."

Skyler walked to Flynn's bedroom door, looking in at where Holly lay sleeping in her crib.

"Sky? Are you still there?"

"Yeah, I'm here."

"Are you listening to what I'm saying? Because this is colossally important for her, this could affect her entire life-"

"Yeah, I'm listening and I'm as worried as you are. She woke up screaming again last night."

Marie sighed. "OK, well until Friday the 9th, just keep reassuring her all the time, just stay with her and...Especially when she's sleeping, you need to be there when she wakes up."

"Yeah, but in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs the first one is food, right? I need to look for a job otherwise I can't feed her."

"I asked Dave about that, he said you can leave her with me or Flynn. Not with somebody she doesn't know, not right now. And preferably not when she's sleeping."

"Yeah, ok."

"What about Flynn, how's he doing? Is there a counsellor at his school, because if not I'll get him in with Dave."

"There is, yeah. I think he went there already, I'm going to ask him about it tonight."

"Is it someone who's properly qualified?"

"Well, it's a high school, so you'd think they know what they're doing with their staff."

"Oh yeah, they employed someone who makes meth as a science teacher - wonderful school that is."

"Hey - that's not, that's no reflection on the school."

"If I was a parent there I'd be a little worried right now."

"Y _es_ , and they-" Skyler was all ready with a sarcastic comment, but she stopped herself. It wasn't something she wanted either her sister or her son to hear.

"And they what?"

"Nothing. How are you? You saw Dave?"

"Yeah! Yeah I saw Dave! He really fired me up!"

"Yeah?"

"He told me life is gonna suck for a while. I could've figured that myself."

"Yeah."

"I feel better when I'm angry. I told him that, and he said anger is a secondary emotion and that it doesn't help in the long run. But it helps in the short run, I said. He said it's better to be calm and talk things through."

"Right."

"With you, he meant. I talked about you a lot. Anger helps me through that, I said. He said anger is a secondary emotion and you have to deal with the source, you have to deal with the reason that you're angry, but I can't do that right now because that's too hard, that's too heartbreaking, that is grief and betrayal to the highest extreme and-" Her voice broke. "And I can't do that right now."

"What can I do? To help."

"To help? What can you do to help, Skyler? Go to hell."

The line cut out. Skyler stood in the hall listening to the beeping in her ear and crying silently. "I'm already there, Marie," she whispered. "I'm already there."


	8. Chapter 8

Marie went back to work on Friday. They told her she didn't have to. But she decided she couldn't face staring at four walls for another three whole days before Monday. They said she didn't have to go back on Monday either, but she needed something to do. She had nothing else now. And she could tell they were awkward with their timeline, because normally when someone goes on compassionate leave it lasts until the funeral or the day after. But there was no funeral. There was no body, no closure, no hope. No light at the end of the tunnel at all.

She got home from work that day to find her nephew waiting for her. He met her in the hall.

"Flynn! Hi!"

"S-sorry, Aunt Marie, I...s-still have my key, s-so I let myself in."

"That's fine" said Marie, walking through to the kitchen and placing some grocery bags on the counter. "How did you get here?"

"Lewis dropped me off."

"Oh good, I'm glad he's helping you out."

"I'm sorry, I…I'm sorry it's b-been a few days since I've come. It's…mainly because of the car thing."

"That's OK, sweetie. You're not obliged to visit your old aunt every day or anything."

"Yeah, but I…j-just wanna check that you're…alright. And I'm the man of the family now, s-so… if you need help with anything."

He swallowed, realising he didn't really have a clue how to fix things or use tools or light a barbeque or any of the much more amazing things his uncle used to do. He tried not to think of the things his dad used to do. He told himself they weren't very much, and that Uncle Hank did a lot more. He realised that that was probably true, and this realisation caused him both relief and pain at the same time.

His aunt smiled sadly. "Thank you. Do you want something to drink? Or eat?"

"Yeah, I'm k-kinda hungry, actually."

"OK, well, I could make you some grilled cheese sandwiches, I know you like those, or, actually I was going to make myself some pizza tonight because it's easy. Would you like some?"

"Y-yeah! I-I'll help you make it."

They worked silently for a little while, Marie slicing mushrooms while Flynn spread tomato sauce on the bases.

"How's your mom?"

"Pr-pretty terrible, I think. She's still trying to find…a job. I'm tr-trying to find one too. But it's hard. B-but that's….the only way I can get a car. Mom says she can't afford to…buy me one."

"Yeah. Well, you know, the DEA froze all her bank accounts. So she really doesn't have any money at all right now."

"W-what?"

"She didn't tell you that, huh? Why am I not surprised."

"What does fr-frozen mean?"

"It means that the accounts still exist, but she can't access them. Nobody can access them until the DEA has finished investigating what's in them. And given that the vast majority of what's in them is the proceeds of crime, she's probably never gonna get them back."

"H-how is she paying for things, then?"

"Credit card, I think. I took over some groceries this morning. She looked like she didn't want to accept them, so I yelled at her a bit too, so she could feel like she'd earned it. It made me feel better too."

"Sh-she's an idiot."

"Yeah. You can say that again."

"I n…never thought I'd say that about…my mom." Flynn shook his head. "I just w-wish she would have told me sooner."

"Yeah, me too," said Marie.

"I could…I could've helped."

"I know you could, you're a very sensible young man. You would've gone straight to the police, wouldn't you?"

"N-no. I would've gone straight to…Uncle Hank."

Marie nodded sadly. "Yeah."

"I w-wanna be like him. I don't wanna be like my dad. I wish…Uncle Hank…was my dad."

"Well then I would have to be your mom!"

"Th-that would be fine," Flynn said, then regretted it. "I f-feel bad for Mom. I'm worried. She's not s-sleeping or…eating very much, and…she's started smoking. And….she still won't tell the truth to me. I mean…the real truth. She says bits of things, and….s-she explains them away, like…like she thinks I wouldn't understand."

"It's not that, it's that she doesn't want you to worry. The strongest reason, as far as I can tell, that she didn't tell anyone what was happening was that she didn't want you to know about it."

"Gr-great, so she can lie to me and treat me like a baby!"

"Yes, well, parents will do that, they have trouble accepting when their babies grow up and can handle things. But it was a pretty enormous thing, though, and she said that when she found out about it it broke her heart, it hurt her an awful lot and she just didn't want that to happen to you."

"W-well done, Mom, it…happened anyway. I-in the worst possible way." Flynn sighed.

"Yeah. You want olives on this? And green peppers? They'd give it a good bit of colour."

"S-sure."

Marie opened the fridge.

"Au-Aunt Marie?"

"Yeah?"

"I-I'm really…really worried about….Mom. S-she just… she's just...I- I've never seen her like this. It's like there…like there's no light in her eyes anymore."

"Mmm."

"A-and I'm really worried about you, too, like...r-really worried, but it's different, M-Mom seems...m-more hopeless, somehow."

….

It was nearly noon the next day by the time Marie got up. Another reason it's better to go to work, she thought. All this moping around can't be good for my figure. She heard a noise in the kitchen, and for one glorious second she thought it was Hank. Then she remembered that Flynn was still there.

She sat up slowly, and dragged herself out of the bed, trying not to look at the empty other side of it. Some days it took hours to pull herself away from that. Today she did it quickly, almost slipping on the tiles as she rushed to the kitchen to hug her nephew.

Flynn didn't have time to finish his morning greeting before he found himself buried in her arms. She began to cry, an exhausted sobbing that didn't let up until the message tone on Flynn's phone went off.

Marie pulled back. "Sorry, honey, you get that. I'm sorry I took so long to get up, have you eaten?"

"I had some cereal w-when I got up."

"Oh God, was that ages ago?"

"I dunno, m-maybe 2 hours ago?"

"I'm sorry. I couldn't get to sleep until really late."

"That's ok, you...can sleep as late as you like. Actually, I've b-been really tired lately. Like, emotions are...really tiring."

"Yeah, they are." Marie blew her nose and looked around the kitchen. "Do you want pancakes?"

"Yeah!" said Flynn enthusiastically.

"OK. You check your phone." Marie went to the pantry and Flynn took his phone out of his pocket.

"It's a message from...Mom. She's just asking h-how are we doing."

"How are you doing?"

"On a scale of...awful to terrible? I...I just can't believe it's been a week already. It's l-like a nightmare I keep...hoping I'll wake up from, but now that it's been a week it makes me think...maybe I won't wake up."

"That's it. That's exactly how it feels."

"W-what is the time now? It's 11:45. Th-this time last week I...was at the carwash and Mom was...showing me how to use the cash register. Well I...I think she'd showed me already...by then, sh-she showed me in the morning and then sh-she was just standing with me and we were doing the work together. And...I-I kept complaining, I kept saying 'It's Saturday, I wanna go home!'… I h-had no idea how good I had it then. I would give a-anything to go back to...a time when my worst problem was having to work at my parents' car wash...on a Saturday."

Marie swallowed. This time last week, she was out shopping. Hank had told her it would be better if she was out of the house, because he and Steve and Jesse Pinkman were plotting something against Walt. So she'd kissed him goodbye and she'd gone down town... She never saw him again.

That meant it had now been more than a week since she'd last seen him. At this realisation Marie gasped, and leaned back onto the counter, suddenly unable to stand unsupported.

Flynn reached out his hand to her, placing it on her shoulder. "Are you a-alright?" he asked.

"Yeah." Marie swallowed. "What happened next?"

"Um, I don't know... Dad gave me some m-money to go across the road to a burger place to get...something to eat. Then I came back and I was...at the cash register with Mom again. That lawyer guy came in, S-Saul Goodman. She was pretending not to know him. Which I now know was a lie. A-at the time I just thought it was cool th-that he came in because he was on TV a-and he was on our billboard. Then... n-not too long after that, I don't know when exactly, maybe...1 o'clock? D-Dad was at the other end of the store and h...he took a phone call and he ran out, I mean he r-ran, he was on the phone and he fr-freaked out and ran...past me and Mom and out the door, a-and we had no idea where he was going. Mom was worried, I was...asking her...what was happening and sh-she didn't know. And she became...different then. She was...really anxious, I think she was scared. She didn't know what was happening, but she knew it was s-something really bad. I was a bit worried too but I...didn't know anything at all, so I j-just didn't think about it, I kept...helping people at the cash register and I...ended up starting to enjoy it. Then you came in."

….

"Good morning, Mrs White. Like you to come with us," said the surliest of the two uniformed officers who came to Skyler's house on Sunday morning.

"Sure. Just let me grab my daughter."

The officers stepped inside the house and looked around. "Is there someone else who can look after her, ma'am?"

"My son isn't here, he's at my sister's house. There's only the two of them."

"Could you ask one of them to meet us down at APD?"

"Well if you'd just called me rather than showing up at my house, I could have arranged that and then gone into APD of my own accord. You don't have to escort me."

"We didn't think you had a car," said the second officer, staring at the boxy brown Corolla now sitting in the house's driveway.

"My uncle bought it for me," said Skyler, pushing Holly's stroller towards the police car.

"Moneybags, that Uncle." The officers chuckled. "He the one who paid for your bail?"

"Yes, and after that he didn't have much left to spare."

"He the only one of your family members who wants to talk to you right now? Apart from the kid."

The offices continued to snigger as they got into the car.

….

"Thank you for coming, honey," said Marie as they pulled up outside 308 Negra Arroyo Lane.

"Yeah, well, I-I'd like to come more often, and I would if I had a car, but you just call me a-anytime, y-you can come get me or...I can ask Lewis or Mom to drive me over."

"I sure will." Marie took Holly's stroller out of the trunk and put the baby capsule inside it. They walked into the house.

"What does the APD want with...Mom?"

"It's a joint operation, the DEA needs all the manpower they can get. And there were plenty of non-drug related crimes that your father committed."

"I thought you said that because they charged her a-already they were...finished with her?"

"Well, the investigation is going to be going on for a while. They'll ask her things whenever they find something new."

"They found something...new?"

"Maybe. Or maybe they're just tidying up."

"I just want them to find...Uncle Hank. I...I hate not knowing."

Marie swallowed. "Yep."

"I'm sorry, j-just tell me if you don't want to talk about it. I know we've...talked about it a lot...already."

"No that's OK, Flynn. I do. Want to talk about it."

"I feel like y-you and me are in the same situation. We-we both...didn't know anything and w-we thought things were...great and then...all of a sudden it blew up and d-destroyed everything and our….our family betrayed us."

Marie sighed. "The betrayal. That's the worst thing. That's what hurts the most. And it stops the possibility of finding relief anytime soon, because the person I always used to go to for help when bad things happened was your mother. Now I can't do that."

"Yes y-you can. Just...talk to her. I know she never...says what you want her to say and she is being pretty f-frustrating at the moment, but... I think it would help if...y-you talk to her."

"Sometimes I want to do that and sometimes I don't. Because I want her to explain it away, I want her to have a reason and an excuse for everything that I can understand and forgive. But if I ask her and she doesn't have that…"


	9. Chapter 9

Letting out a disgruntled sigh, Skyler sat down at the bus stop outside the APD office, pulling a cigarette from her pocket and lighting it.

"They never spring for the return journey, huh?" said a man with a ripped shirt and a missing front tooth who was standing nearby. "They're all keen to pick you up from your house and drive you down the station to 'help them with their enquiries', so you do whatever you can and you help them out of the goodness of your heart, and then after you're done, they never drive you back."

Skyler tried to avert her eyes from him as she took a long drag he her cigarette.

"Can I bum a smoke?" he asked.

She looked up, and reluctantly held out a cigarette to him. He put it in his mouth and leaned towards her, expecting her to light it." She passed him her lighter and let him do it.

"What were you in there for? For them to move their asses about on a Sunday, must be something pretty serious!"

"Yeah," she said quietly. "Yeah, pretty serious."

As he handed the lighter back he looked at her more closely, and his eyebrows rose as a lightning bolt of recognition passed across his face. "I know you! You're all over the news! Jesus, Marie and Joseph, it's Mrs Heisenberg in the flesh!"

Skyler raised a hand, making eye contact with him for the first time. "I'm not," she said, "I'm not, I…"

Her voice petered out, and she leaned defeatedly back on the bus bench. She was. She knew she was.

….

Skyler arrived home to find Flynn and Marie watching a movie. Holly was sitting on Marie's lap sucking on a dried apricot.

"Hey, Mom," Flynn jumped up and came around to hug her. "I'm sorry I was away so long, A-Aunt Marie and I have...been talking and l-looking after each other."

"Good. That's really good, don't apologise - y-you do that, definitely do that."

"What did APD...ask you?"

"Oh. Nothing much."

"Honesty, Skyler," Marie interjected.

Skyler looked at her. "They had some questions about a storage locker that I rented."

"Why?" asked Flynn.

Skyler picked up Holly and held her close, cooing over her. "Are you OK, sweetheart?" she said softly.

"You were gone a while," said Marie curtly.

"Yeah, I had to take the bus back. Took a while."

"You could have called."

"Oh, that's ok. You're busy."

"We're watching Star Wars, Mom, we're not...busy."

"It's OK. I have no right to expect anything from you, so."

Marie rolled her eyes.

"O-of course we'll...do things for you, Mom, w-we're family!"

"Thank you for coming and getting Holly."

"Yeah, of course w-we came and got Holly! We look out for her and we look out...for you! If you'll just... let us! If you'll just…talk to us!"

"Seriously, Skyler, it's a two way street," said Marie. "This whole problem happened because you closed off from your family. So stop it."

"I'm sorry, I didn't think it was a big deal, I didn't mind taking the bus."

Marie stared at her sister, breathing heavily.

"Can I make you dinner?" Skyler offered.

"No, I gotta go." Marie grabbed her hand bag and headed for the door.

"Oh, no, Aunt Marie, s-stay for dinner!"

Marie gave Flynn a hug. "Thank you for spending the weekend with me. You made everything so much better." She stroked his cheek.

"But you should…stay for dinner!"

Marie turned away.

"Please, Marie. Stay. You bought most of the food anyway."

Marie turned. "You'll be honest? You'll engage with your family?"

"Whatever you want me to do, I'll do it."

Marie sighed. "Alright. I think you've got the ingredients for a chicken stir fry in there. With lots of greens and that cute little Chinese corn. I feel like I haven't been eating enough vegetables lately."

"Me too." A shadow of a smile passed across Skyler's face.

"Hey, not eating vegetables is absolutely...O-OK with me," said Flynn.

"You keep telling yourself that, mister," said Skyler, turning to the fridge.

Flynn smiled. "So Mom, Aunt Marie and I were talking about h-how we feel like you're...pushing us away all the time, a-and you always were, which is why this problem happened in the first place be...because you didn't ask for help and...you didn't tell anyone. And we were hoping that you'd be smart enough to have learnt your lesson...by now, about that, but... you haven't, because you're s-still pushing us away. A-and the only way that we're going to get through this as a f-family is if we all be honest with each other and s-support each other."

Skyler had been rummaging in the fridge, but she stopped and turned around, placing some vegetables on the counter and meeting her son's eyes. She looked across at her sister, who was sitting at the table, looking straight ahead.

"Flynn, you're so young. You shouldn't be having to deal with any of this."

"But I'm in it, Mom! I am dealing with it a-all, because it's happening! I can't avoid it. And if you'd... told me sooner, I could have helped, but...it's too late for that now, but I need to know what happened because I n-need to understand it, and we need to support each other going forward...and I can't...do that if you keep br-brushing me off and...lying to me."

"I'm not lying to you."

"You did, you lied to me...a lot."

Skyler nodded. "I did. But I'm not anymore."

"OK, so...tell me about the stuff that you didn't tell me about before, b-because I need help to understand it!"

Skyler began chopping vegetables, breathing out slowly. "What do you want to know?" she asked.

"I don't know, um... Like...how long was he doing it before you f-found out?"

"Let's see, um... He had 8 weeks of chemotherapy, which didn't start until a good 6 weeks after the diagnosis. So that's 3 and a half months. Then there was about a month of waiting to see, then there was the surgery, then 4 weeks of recovery after that. So a bit over 5 months, I guess."

"W-what do you mean? That's the timeline of...the cancer."

"Well I assume he started doing it pretty soon after he was diagnosed. He was already doing his long walks before I found out he even had cancer. And I found out about a month in, so…"

"But he was sick!"

"Yep. But he is also a very determined and stubborn man. Like I said, I don't know exactly, but there are things I knew that I was wondering about, things he did, that when I did figure it out it made sense that he had been doing it from around that time. Plus there was the money. He never took any money from Gretchen and Elliot, so. Whenever it was, it was before he started treatment."

"So you mean you… still, even now...y-you don't know?"

"Not exactly. I never wanted to know very much."

No one spoke for a couple of minutes. Skyler washed some rice and put it on the stove.

"So h-how did you find out?"

"Um. I found out that he had a... second cell phone."

" _That_ long ago?" exclaimed Marie. "That was like a year and a half ago-"

"No, I-"

"You were still pregnant with Holly then!"

"I didn't find out then. Finding out took months."

"Was it something to do with the fugue state? Was that-"

"Marie, stop!" Skyler raised a hand, desperate for Flynn not to hear or wonder _anything_ about the fugue state.

It was hard to tell if Marie's expression was one of hurt, shock or steeliness. Her eyes locked with Skyler's, and Skyler attempted to use this to convey unspoken meaning. "I'm sorry, but please remember what happened the other day when you did that and remember what I said." Her eyes flicked to Flynn and back. "The two of you have asked me to give you an honest explanation, and I will, but it's not a multiple choice quiz, it is very hard for me to say and I will be able to explain a lot more if you don't interject, and Marie, I'm not saying that to try and restrict you or tell you off," Skyler stepped to the edge of the kitchen on the guise of approaching the fridge, leaning towards the living room in a way that let Marie see her eyes but not Flynn. "You know what I mean, right?" She locked eyes with Marie, her eyes widening.

Marie's eyes showed reluctant understanding. Skyler took some more vegetables out of the fridge and began to slice them, arranging the different kinds into neat piles on her chopping board.

"There had been a suggestion of a second cell phone earlier, yes, but Walt denied it and I had to believe him. I found out that it was true when he was going into surgery, they gave him some drugs to relax him and it caused him to drop his guard. I asked him if he'd packed his cell phone, and he said, 'Which one?'"

"Which one?" Flynn repeated.

Skyler paused, planning her words. Saying it, she found quickly, was not nearly as momentous as experiencing it. Its monstrosity would need explaining, but the only way to do so was to describe to her son just how often his father had lied to her.

"Y-you figured it out just from that?" Flynn was asking.

"Not exactly. It was just that I couldn't ignore it anymore at that point."

Realisation dawned on Flynn's face. "Because he was lying to you."

Skyler didn't answer. Marie stood up and came towards them, leaning on the end of the counter.

"W-what did you do next?" asked Flynn.

"Oh. Made some calls. Checked some things." Skyler took some chicken from the fridge and began cutting it into chunks.

"Mom."

Skyler looked up. Flynn raised his eyebrows. "R-remember that honesty thing we...talked about? Th-throw us a bone here."

"Oh, it's just a little embarrassing, is all. I thought he was having an affair. I couldn't think of any other reason why he would have a second cell phone. So I called Gretchen Schwartz."

"You thought Walt was having an affair with Gretchen Schwartz?" Marie learned forward, her interest piqued.

Skyler raised a hand. "He wasn't. What he was actually doing was cooking crystal meth, but since that is a pretty far-fetched scenario, it did not enter my wildest imagination; I just thought he was having an affair."

"Why M-Mrs Schwartz? She's married!" said Flynn.

"So is he." Skyler turned away and put some oil in a pan, placing it on the stove. "They weren't having an affair, but I thought they were because something was clearly up with the two of them, that time she came here she left as soon as he arrived, and things seemed really weird between the two of them, and that afternoon, he followed her back to Santa Fe just to go talk to her."

Skyler threw the chicken in the pan and began to stir it around. "But it turned out the reason that things were really weird between Gretchen and Walt was not that they were having an affair, it was that he had told us that she and Elliott were paying for his treatment when they weren't. Eventually, she told me that, and I was quite surprised to hear it because Walt had had a full round of chemo by then, which was very expensive, plus doctor's appointments and scans and all sorts of things, and I checked all the bills and everything was paid up except for the surgery. And how else could he have done that?" Skyler shrugged and turned back to the dinner.

Marie and Flynn were silent for a minute, taking it in. Skyler threw some vegetables into the pan and began to stir them.

"So did you ask him about it?" asked Marie. "What did he say?"

Skyler sighed. "No, well, he'd just had surgery. He couldn't be left alone, he couldn't be...subjected to stress. He needed looking after. The day Dr Delcavoli told us that he could be left on his own, I kicked him out of the house."

"How… how long was that? A-after you found out?"

"Two...three weeks."

"What, you found out that he was a...drug lord and y-you let him stay here just because he was sick? And you l-looked after him? I remember you looking after him, y-you took...really good care of him after the surgery!"

Skyler looked her son in the eye. "Wouldn't you?"

Flynn looked back, his eyes conveying a thousand conflicting emotions.

"What did he say? When you kicked him out," asked Marie, a shadow of a sadistic smile spreading across her face.

"Not much."

"He didn't try to explain it all away?"

"That was about the only time that he didn't."

"Th-that was ages ago, Mom," said Flynn. "More than a year, l-like…. That was like a year and a half ago, I remember that it was before I…turned sixteen, cos on my 16th birthday, h-he wasn't living here."

Marie shook her head. "I can't believe you let it go on this long."

Skyler nodded. "I have no excuse for that, both of you, I… I'm sorry."

No-one spoke for a couple of minutes. Skyler was incredibly grateful that they were doing this while she was cooking, so she had something to do with her hands, and something to turn away to. She put some sauce in the pan, turned down the heat and checked on the rice.

She heard Flynn asking Marie how she had found out, and her heart sank. For all the explanations, for all the justifications she could give for why she hadn't dobbed Walt into the police when she found out, and even for why she'd helped him hide what he was doing with the money laundering, what she had done last, in sticking by him after Hank had found out, in turning her back on her sister and allowing her husband to blackmail her brother-in-law – no, in helping him do that – this was what she really couldn't justify. As she had told Flynn when he had asked her why she had gone along with it, she would be asking herself why for the rest of her life, but for the rest of it she knew, or at least could cobble together, what her motivations were at the time. For these last actions, though, she could not understand even herself.

She heard Marie telling Flynn about the Walt Whitman book, and realised she'd never known. Another detail Walt had left out, and she hadn't bothered to ask.

"The cook out was like three weeks ago, though," said Flynn. "Wh-why didn't it…why -"

Skyler looked at her sister, her eyes pleading.

"-why didn't it…blow up then?"

"Because Hank had no proof," explained Marie. "He was looking for proof, and…when he found it, he was killed."

"But the….the book in the bathroom is pretty good proof!"

"Well, owning a book with an inscription written by a dead man proves nothing. Your dad could've said he got it at a yard sale."

"I-it had his initials, though!"

"His initials, not his name. It proves nothing. That's what Hank said."

Flynn paused, taking this in. "Was…was that Uncle Hank's…k-karaoke guy?"

"What?" asked Skyler.

"Uncle Hank h-had this video of this guy doing karaoke, it was…hilarious, but the guy was…murdered, and…" His face fell. "Did Dad murder him?"

Skyler froze. She had been looking at her son, because she had asked him a question, and she couldn't look away. She felt like time had frozen as she looked at him, but Marie, not noticing this, quickly said, "No, Jesse Pinkman did."

Skyler turned to her sister, her expression changing from horror to surprise. "How do you know that?"

"Pinkman confessed it. To Hank and Steve." She looked down and began fiddling with her hands. "I heard them talking about it. I told the DEA...after." She looked up again.

"Wh-who was this…Pinkman guy? Uncle Hank went looking for him before, when he s-shot the guy with the grill."

Skyler jumped back to the stove to rescue the rice, which was burning. She marvelled at how much her son already knew. She marvelled at how much her sister knew as well. As she listened to her answering Flynn's questions, Skyler realised that Marie knew more than she did. Marie could give the DEA a lot more information than Skyler could.

"So Pinkman killed the...karaoke guy and he was w-with the…drug dealer guy with the grill?" Flynn was saying. "He sounds really…badass."

Marie considered this. "Not really."

"YES really," said Skyler. "That's enough. Dinner is ready." She took some plates out of the cupboard and placed them on the counter.

"Mom! Y-you're meant to not...sh-shut me down, remember? Be honest, keep talking!"

"I don't know anything about the lowlifes your father did business with, and I don't want to. And you should not be gossiping about them as if they were worthy of some interest or reverence, because they're not. They're not worth thinking about at all."

"There's your problem, then," said Marie, sitting down heavily at the table as Skyler began to dish up the meal with shaking hands. "You're just the queen of the blind eye, aren't you? See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Especially speak no evil. Well unfortunately the fact that you ignored it did not mean that it didn't happen."

Skyler continued serving the food, all too aware of the truth of the statement, and realising she had just admitted that she even now did not want to know the details of Walt's activities.

But now she did know. Now it was all coming out on the news, so many foul things her husband had done that she'd never known about, and it was horrifying.

"Nothing to say to that, huh?" said Marie, stabbing a piece of Chinese corn with her fork.

"No, Marie. I have nothing to say to that because you are right."

"Mmm."

For a few minutes silence reigned again, punctuated by the sound of cutlery on crockery and chewing.

Skyler took a breath. "Was there anything else that the two of you wanted me to explain to you?"

"Yeah." Flynn nodded, thinking.

"Of course, Skyler. A thousand things I'll never understand."

"I-I'd like to know about the...gambling thing, Was...was that all a lie?"

"Yes. We made that up as a way to explain how we got the money to buy the car wash."

"Skyler, stop it," said Marie. "We? We made up the story about the gambling? That was you, Skyler. You were the only one who ever told that story, Walt at best interjected with about 2% of the information in it. When you first told me at the hospital he said nothing at all. And then when we had the dinner, again, it was all you. You told me stories throughout my childhood, I know what kind of story teller you are. It was thorough. That's you, you're thorough. Walt's not thorough, not with stuff about himself."

Skyler began eating silently, her eyes fixed firmly on her plate. Flynn, who hadn't picked up on this at all, looked at his aunt in shock, and then back at his mother. The seconds stretched out.

"S-seriously, Mom? You're...just going to be silent? Were you not listening to anything I-"

"I came up with the story when Hank was in the hospital. We'd just been told that his HMO wouldn't cover enough physical therapy to enable him to walk again. Walt had this money that was sitting there that I didn't want to touch, it was dirty, it frightened me, it had destroyed my marriage and I hated it, but he wouldn't take it away and he wouldn't give it up, it was just...there. And suddenly there was a use for it. Something that would make a difference, give some meaning to the train wreck that our lives had become. Make it give something back. More than anything else, I just wanted to help you and Hank. We had the money there, so we couldn't not give it to you. But there had to be a reason, a story. So yeah, I made it. I came up with it."

"Wait, what was this?" asked Flynn. "You gave something to...Uncle Hank?"

Marie sat up, a look of deep contemplation on her face. "Your mother… and father... gave me the money for Hank's physical therapy. The DEA HMO was only going to pay for 4 sessions a week, and with that he probably wouldn't have been able to walk again. He needed daily sessions and our house needed modification to enable him to have the sessions at home." She pointed at Skyler. "They paid for all of that."

"Whoah, seriously? M-Mom helped Uncle Hank to walk again?"

"Yeah, but now, if he couldn't walk, he'd still be alive." Marie burst into tears. Skyler looked up, a hand reaching involuntarily towards her, but she saw that Flynn had taken her into his arms, so she looked at her plate again, pushing the food on it around listlessly.

"I've thought of that myself a few times over the past few days," Skyler said. "That if he hadn't been able to walk, he wouldn't have been able to go out into To'hajiilee or wherever the hell they were. But you know what, I know Hank. He was so determined, he wouldn't have let that stop hmm. If he was following a lead, I think he would have gone out there either way."

Marie gritted her teeth. "He wouldn't have had to _go out there_ if you had helped him when he asked you!"

Skyler gulped, immediately wishing she'd said nothing. "I know," she said quietly.

"Or if you had just said anything ever! I appreciated the offer of help with the treatment at the time, but if I'd known it was drug money I never would have accepted it, and neither would Hank. And you knew that, which is why you deliberately constructed a story to make us believe that it was all OK!"

All Skyler could do was nod stiffly, looking down at her plate.

"And if you knew us at all, me and Flynn and Hank, you would know that what we value and what we believe in is not getting mysterious money from nowhere and looking the other way, it's doing the right thing and following the law - Hank was a DEA agent, for crying out loud, it was pretty clear what he believed in, and you abused that by sneaking that in behind his back without him even knowing - and that's not just your fault, that's my fault and I curse myself for not asking, for not looking, for just trusting and turning a blind eye to your deception!"

"Uncle Hank w-would not have been OK with that, Mom. I-I even think he would have rather...not walk at all."

"I wasn't trying to compromise him. I was never... You gotta believe me, I would never, the thought never crossed my mind. I just wanted to help."

In the silence that followed, Skyler gathered together the plates and walked into the kitchen. Marie's eyes followed her.

"Yeah," said Flynn. "I s-see what you mean, that would be a hard...situation to be in when you have the money which Dad got for evil but y-you wanted to use it...for good. I can see why you would maybe n-not think that through. Not think about what U-Uncle Hank really wanted."

"No, she didn't think anything through," said Marie. "I mean, not just about that but in general, with this whole situation with Walt, how could anybody conclude that keeping silent about it was a good idea? I mean, back at the start, when you didn't really know what he was doing, and you didn't think it was that bad, maybe you thought it was bad enough for you to kick him out of the house but not bad enough to send him to prison, OK, I can sort of understand - I mean, I wouldn't do it myself, but I can sort of understand why back when you didn't really know what he was doing or what he was capable of, I can see how you would want to turn a blind eye and just hope it went away, or hope he went away, but he didn't, he forced his way back into your house, and he kept doing it, on and on and it got worse and worse, and why, I mean, why, at that point would you still think that staying silent was a good idea?"

"I didn't." Skyler shook her head.

"Yes you did, you must have, because you kept on saying nothing, even when you were specifically asked, I specifically asked you so many times what was wrong, and -"

"It snowballed. There was no point when I thought it was a good idea to do this or to do that, I did nothing. My thoughts were not coherent at all, they were an endless battle of if I do this I'm risking that but if I do that I'm risking this other thing - it never stopped, my head is so tired from all the circles my thoughts went in over and over and over and there was no good way. There was no good action I could take."

"So what were you doing?"

"I don't know. I have no idea."

"Oh, come on."

"I was trying to limit the damage."

"How?" Marie threw her hands up in the air. "How is this limiting the damage? You actually thought that if you ignored it it would go away? And we would walk off into the sunset and drink lemonade? And Walt and Hank would go to mineral shows together, and Hank would walk perfectly, and Walt would be an attentive and good person, and Flynn would never go through any pain ever, and you and I would braid our hair, and -"

"No, I… No! I never had a solution, Marie, I never thought that far ahead! I was just trying to keep our heads above water! I had no plan, I had no way forward, I was just stuck, if I moved in any direction the consequences would be so far reaching, that... It was just safest to stay where I was. That was all I could do."

"Stay where you were laundering the drug money? You stepped in a pretty firm direction when you started doing that, Skyler."

Skyler nodded, sniffing. "The money had to be clean for Hank, for his treatment. I did move then, I took action then."

"What?"

"You're right." She sniffed again. "I did take action then. That was the point when I truly became part of it, when I compromised myself, and as soon as I'd done that, I couldn't ask for help anymore. I had to stay silent. And the really horrible thing was that at the point when I decided to do it, and put all that effort into getting the car wash, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I didn't know how serious it was or how deep it went or how _dangerous_ it was. The more I think about that, I think what an idiot I was to think I could fix anything by doing that. I came up with the gambling story, and I put quite a lot of thought into that, I thought I'd planned it all out, I… thought it was a good thing that we had to do, because you needed the money for Hank, and -"

"Wait, Skyler, are you saying that you bought the car wash to launder the money for Hank's medical bills?"

"Yeah."

"What?" said Flynn.

"That's how it started, I'm not saying that's how it continued, but how it started was that you gave me the first bill and then Walt gave me a cheque, and the name on the cheque was some crazy company I'd never heard of - it was a smoke screen company, a-a…"

"A money laundry?"

"Yeah, the cheque looked sketchy, and I asked him what is this company, who's doing this, why and how because if those questions couldn't be answered, you and Hank would be compromised. The funny thing is, I wasn't even thinking about the drug money at that point, I wasn't thinking about money laundering going forward, I was more worried about the tax code, because if this crazy company wasn't a legitimate business then how did I know it had all its paperwork in order, that there wasn't some glaring inconsistencies somewhere that the IRS could pick up. I know how easy it is for a little thing with the IRS to blow up and lead to all sorts of other question, and the more I looked into what Walt's plan was for making this money clean for Hank, the more I realised that he didn't have one, and his lawyer, Saul Goodman - this is when he first introduced me to Saul, because I was asking questions and he said, 'Saul is sorting this out, he will answer your questions,' but Saul was not offering a safe solution. You know what he's like from his TV commercials, he's outlandish, he talks a lot, he says, 'I'll do this and sort that out, you leave it up to me,' all language that just amounts to nobody being very careful. He couldn't give me an adequate solution, so I became the solution. I was the only person I trusted to do it right."

"Wait, what do you mean?" Asked Flynn. "W-why did you need the car wash for Uncle Hank's medical bills? How much money was it?"

"It was a lot, but your father had it, that wasn't the problem, the problem was that what I had failed to consider when I told Aunt Marie I would give her the money is that Hank was a DEA agent, so that money had to be clean. There had to be a legitimate reason for it to exist, and if it couldn't be proven on paper that it was clean then he would be in trouble. I got this tunnel vision about it and thought that in order to protect them _I_ had to clean the money because I didn't trust anybody else. The whole thing spun out of control from there. I compromised myself, I couldn't get out of it, I couldn't ask for help, I was very very very very stupid the whole way through, and now I'm going to prison for it which is fine, that's absolutely deserved, but Hank is dead and all those months ago when I tried to help him all I ended up doing was destroying his life and mine." Skyler looked at Marie, her eyes wet and her breathing ragged.

Marie met her eyes, and looked into them for a moment. Then she looked away. "It can't have been just that, though. Really? That's the whole reason you bought the car wash?"

"I'd already agreed to pay the medical bills. I'd already spoken to Saul Goodman, who kept saying that Walt needed a business to launder his money. Which I thought was true. Saul kept coming up with crazy ideas that would not have worked. I came up with the only idea that would work. The car wash. But you can't have a money laundry business without someone running the accounts who actually launders the money, so...that was me."

"And the fact that incidental to that you got to get a brand new car and be a millionaire….That didn't enter into it at all, I suppose."

"At that time no, it didn't. I thought we would get a good business that would support us and the kids and that I would not have to worry about money anymore, which when you've spent 16 years worrying about it is…a big deal. But no. I didn't do it for the money."

"Bullshit, Skyler. If someone handed me eleven million dollars on a silver platter, I'd want it."

"I'm not saying I didn't. Of course I wanted to the money, and I am so ashamed of that. But that's not why I got involved. I got involved to make the money clean for Hank. Which is pathetic, I know, I compromised him irrevocably and he never go away from that, but all I can do now is swear to you that that was never my intention."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?"

Skyler shrugged. "It doesn't matter why I did it. The point is I did it. And it ruined your life."

"But are you saying that...if Hank hadn't got injured you wouldn't have done all this?"

"I don't know. I guess I'd still be guilty of concealing a felony, but not of money laundering. And maybe Walt would have been caught a while back. I don't know. Or maybe all the same things would have happened and I would have done it anyway because maybe I'm the sort of selfish and morally wrong person who just wanted to do it...for the money. It's possible, but...but I don't think so. I can't second guess myself at all because a couple of years ago if you'd asked me if I thought I was capable of doing any of this, I would have said no, but I have done, so... I can't be sure. But I don't think I would have, because back then I hated the whole thing and it scared me and I didn't want anything to do with it, and I particularly didn't want to make anything worse for any of us. But what happened was that I made a series of spectacularly stupid decisions, each of which lead into the next one, because I'd done the first thing I had to continue to the next thing, and it just kept continuing and continuing and I dug myself deeper and deeper and deeper into an enormous hole that I could not get up from."

"So what," said Flynn. "Y-you're saying that because you did…one stupid thing you then thought y-you had to do another stupid thing and then another and…another, and at no point did it occur to you to just _s_ - _stop_ and ask for help?"

"Well I couldn't. Because as soon as I did the first stupid thing, as soon as I got involved, I broke the law myself. So the stakes got a whole lot higher because it meant that if the police ever found out, you and Holly would not have one parent in prison but two. I started doing it because I made a stupid decision, but I kept doing it because I had to protect myself."

"A-and you didn't see that coming? Y-you didn't foresee that you were digging yourself into a hole? That helping cr-criminals escape the law is a ridiculous idea?"

"Obviously I should have told you, then, shouldn't I? You're very good at cutting through the crap. I'm not, it seems."

Everyone was quiet for a few minutes, each lost in their own thoughts. Flynn appreciated that his mother had finally listened to him and shared something meaningful, but he still couldn't understand why she'd broken the law. Marie was touched to hear that she's started doing it for Hank, but still very bitter that the ultimate result for Hank had been extremely negative, and also a little concerned that Skyler had said she was too afraid to seek help.

"Skyler, you know that we would have helped you. If you confess to breaking the law, if you go to the police yourself, if you come in from the cold, they always look more favourably on you. Hank had a lot of influence, you know, he could have helped you. And he really wanted to. You did ask us for help. When we took the kids. And I asked you so many times what was wrong. You wanted help at that point. Right?"

"Yeah."

Flynn looked at his mother, realising with a stab of guilt that he had never even asked her if she was ok at that point. He'd just yelled at her for kicking him out of his house.

"Were you afraid of what we'd say?" Marie asked

Skyler knotted vehemently. "Terrified," she said. "You and the police. Terrified."

"Yeah, but Hank would have helped you! If you'd come in yourself, and there were no DEA agents killed, and you'd given them Walt, you would have got off with a slap on the wrist!"

Skyler stopped eating, and looked up slowly. She looked into Marie's eyes. "I know," she said.

Silence again. All three looked back down at their meals, their forks digging into their food.

After a long minute, Flynn spoke. "I can't believe Dad did that to you. If he wants to go and…br-break the law and be an asshole, th-that's his problem. The consequences are on him. But to drag you into it? To m-make you break the law so that he could get away with it? To m-make you feel like y-you couldn't tell anyone for fear of going to jail because he…dragged you down with him? Asshole! I can't believe any man would do that to his wife!"

"Hear hear," said Marie.

"It makes me so angry! E-everyone's coming after Mom now, people s-saying things about her, a-and it wasn't her fault, it was his!"

Skyler put her face in her hands.

"I'm sorry, Mom, I-I've said some angry things to you as well, a-and I am…still angry with you, but I'm angry that y-you didn't ask us for help. He…forced you to do things that w-weren't your fault, but I hate that you didn't feel that you could trust us to…help you."

Skyler shook her head. "No, Flynn. It was my idea. The car wash was my idea."

"The meth cooking was…his idea! A-and even if you were in on it, l-like even if the two of you robbed a bank together or something, when the police came, y-you should face it together and he should protect you because it was his…freaking idea in the first place, but he's run away! He pulled you into it and th-then he ran away and left you to…face it all! The police are throwing e-everything at you - and I know about this, I read the newspapers, M-Mom, you can't keep this from me - now, because of him, y-you are absolutely screwed, but like Aunt Marie said, if they had him, they would leave you…alone. But he's just run off and left you to bear e-everything. What a coward!"

"Coward," Marie repeated.

"He wouldn't even face it!"

"Just be a man, that's what Hank said."

"He's not a man at all. A m-man doesn't treat a woman like that."

Skyler was frozen. Legally, it was in her interests to make it look like she had been subjected to as much coercion as possible. If she couldn't make a jury think that Walt had forced her to do what she did, she could go to prison for a very long time. It was in her interests to make everyone think that he threatened her, even abused her. But that was the last thing she wanted her son to think. She knew she'd made her own bed to lie in, she'd made her own choices, and though the thought of prison terrified her greatly, she knew that she deserved it. But Holly needed her to be free. It was the first time that the interests of her two children had conflicted.

"A-and he's such a coward that when he was beaten, when he was out…s-smarted by uncle Hank and he was in handcuffs, r-rather than accept that he'd been beaten and face what he'd done, he-he just...murdered him!"

Skyler jumped up, jumped back from the table and fairly ran down the hall, where she stood, shaking, with one hand over her mouth and the other supporting her against the wall. She knew that that wasn't true, but she could say nothing against it. Walt himself, in his recorded phone call in which he had blackened himself to save her, had deliberately made it look like he had killed Hank and that this proved that he had threatened Skyler. She was the only one who knew that he hadn't. And while she had briefly, harrowingly, entertained the possibility that he might have killed Hank, when she asked him about it, she saw the look in his eyes. She'd been married to that man for nearly 18 years. She knew when he was lying. She didn't always know what it was about, but she knew when he put on a facade, and she knew when it fell, and it fell then. She saw the look in his eyes when he told her that he had tried to save Hank.

It all must have been his fault, still. Hank wouldn't have been there without him. Walt wouldn't have gotten away if Hank hadn't been killed. But she saw the tears in his eyes, and she knew he hadn't done it.

But she also knew that her best chance was for people to think that he had.

"Mom?" Flynn appeared at the end of the corridor. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you."

A tiny scream escaped Skyler's throat. She didn't want Flynn to think that about his father. She didn't want him to think that about his father. Flynn loved his father.

Marie appeared behind Flynn as he walked towards his mother.

"Mom? Come here."

As he took her into his arms, Skyler finally broke. She sobbed much harder then she had ever sobbed in her life.

Marie joined them, and the three of them sobbed together.

Skyler was sobbing the hardest. But it was for a completely different reason than they thought.


	10. Chapter 10

Every time she thought of it, Marie would count the hours since she last saw Hank. But it had been more than a week, and there was still no sign of him. She went through the motions of getting up, getting dressed, doing her day and then going back home again. For the first few days, Ramey would phone her every day or so – and Blanca Gomez, she presumed – with an update. But by the eighth day, he stopped doing that because he didn't have anything new to report. She phoned him on the ninth day, and he said so. Nothing new to report. No idea where the bodies were. They'd found Walt's car in To'hajiilee Reservation, but on a road, so who knew where it was driven from. The tribal police had followed the tyre tracks for a while, but the dirt roads around there are riddled with so many tracks, they soon lost them.

Skyler's life descended further and further into hell. She'd thought that causing her sister the worst and most permanent pain she could possibly feel was the lowest she could ever go; it wasn't. Because then she had to go out, without access to any bank accounts and knowing she was soon going to lose her house, and try to find a job. She had to try to find a job when her face was all over the news as a money launderer. She put her maiden name on her resume, and left the car wash off it, but people knew her face. They stared at her everywhere she went.

The first week, she handed out 40 resumes, filled out twenty-one applications, and got three interviews, one on Friday and two on Monday. The first one started off alright, until the company's other employees started gathering at the window of their boss's office to look at her, at which point he cut the interview short and said he'd call her. He didn't. For the second interview, the interviewer looked unsure and uncomfortable but went through the motions of asking Skyler a few questions anyway, just to be polite. It didn't go anywhere. For the third, the secretary took one look at her and said, "No way."

She turned to look at her boss, saying, "Do you know who this is?"

"Yeah," he replied. "No way."

"I'm a good worker," said Skyler. "I know the tax code off by heart, I can -"

They laughed. "Seriously?" said the boss. "You think I'm gonna let a felon anywhere near my accounts?"

Skyler changed the sort of jobs she was applying for, setting her sights lower and lower, and still got nowhere. Then there was the panic that shot through her every time she thought about losing the house, and she went to see a handful of rental properties, but she couldn't apply for any until she got a job. Without a job, she couldn't pay rent. Simple as that.

If Skyler wasn't a calculating woman who planned for all eventualities, her children would have starved in that first month. The DEA had frozen every bank account she had. When she pleaded with them that she had children to feed, they told her to use a credit card. "And spend money I don't have when my income is zero? You want me to commit my children to a life of debt?"

"You should've thought of that before you decided to run the books of a meth empire and get two federal agents killed. Crime doesn't pay, Mrs White. That's the whole point."

Because Skyler was a calculating woman who planned for all eventualities, she had her stash of illicit cash. It was ironic that she had used that to buy a car, because this car could therefore be seized just like the last one, but without a car she couldn't look for work, and that was priority number one.

She also used the dirty money, in conjunction with a credit card, in a carefully rationed manner, to pay for bills and groceries, and nobody appreciated more than Skyler the irony of that, as it meant she had to keep using the dirty money to pay for things for her family _after_ she had been charged with money laundering and profiting from a felony.

But then, nobody else _could_ appreciate it, because she didn't tell them.

She got very little sleep, and most nights she spent several hours crying. The only thing that stopped her curling into a ball and refusing to get out of bed in the morning was the rising panic that if she didn't find a job soon, she would lose her kids. Because they could stay with Marie, that would be no problem. But she didn't think that she could. And she was going to prison anyway, at which point she might never get them back.

She paid for cigarettes using the dirty money. They were dirty anyway. She hated herself for smoking them. But they were the only thing that helped her cope.

She was smoking her third cigarette of the evening when Marie arrived. Putting it out, Skyler answered the door.

"Did I just see you blowing smoke out the front window?" Marie's face crinkled with distaste. "Oh god, it stinks in here, what are you doing? Where are the kids?"

"Flynn's at Lewis's. Holly's over there."

Marie looked and saw Holly's crib by the fireplace.

"WHAT? She's in the same room with you smoking?"

"That's why I'm blowing it out the window."

"No! Skyler, no, what are you doing? Why can't you put her in the bedroom?"

Skyler shook her head. "She's safer here."

"In the smoke pit from hell? I don't think so!"

"She's safer here. Unless you wanna take her. I would be powerless to stop you if you did."

"Sky, not too long ago you were _asking_ me to take her."

"I know."

Marie was living in hell. Every minute, every hour, she missed him. She couldn't smile, she couldn't laugh. She couldn't think of a future of anything other than loneliness and misery. And then there was the anxiety of _not_ knowing, not knowing where he was, not knowing what happened, not knowing if he died quickly or slowly, in pain and afraid.

But Skyler seemed worse. She spoke in a monotone these days, barely making eye contact. The items in her once proud home were gradually disappearing as she sold them piecemeal on eBay. What was left was in a mess of boxes. At least that meant she was doing things, Marie thought.

She was still angry with her sister, bitterly angry, and more than that, bitterly hurt. But every time she went over there to give her a piece of her mind, she just ended up feeling sorry for her.

Skyler picked up her half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray and lit it again.

"Alright, enough!" yelled Marie, grabbing it from her and pushing it back into the ashtray. "Your husband has lung cancer, in case you've forgotten."

Skyler picked up her glass of wine instead. She looked Marie in the eyes for the first time. "Ironic, right? Many things about this situation are bitterly, bitterly ironic."

"Yeah, you're bitterly ironic, I don't understand you! You were so proactive in helping Walt break the law and in refusing to help Hank and making that god damn blackmail video, you were standing tall through all of that, doing it all, and, what, now you're finally rid of the guy you're just gonna curl up in a ball? A smoke ball."

"I'd do that if I could, yeah. But I can't because I have to spend all day every day looking for a job, getting laughed out of interview after interview, which is actually really soul destroying. But my soul is already destroyed anyway, so no big deal." She took a long gulp of the wine.

"Oh, come on, don't write yourself off."

"Why are you here?"

"Oh, you wanna kick me out?"

"No I don't." Skyler shook her head strongly. "But how can you even look at me? After what I've done?"

Marie shrugged. "I don't have anyone else."

Skyler's eyes moistened. There was the elephant in the room.

"So can I assume from your reaction when I brought it up the other day that the fugue state was a fake?"

Skyler leaned back on the sofa, her posture sliding down it as if it was eating her. "Yeah," she said quietly.

"Bastard." Marie sat down at the other end of the sofa. "What was he really doing?"

"I don't know. That's my problem, isn't it, I never want know these things. Not that he'd have told me if I'd asked."

"He was found buck naked in a supermarket."

"Yup."

"You're saying he did that...deliberately? "

Skyler sighed. "I assume so."

"You mean you don't even know?"

"I know shit all, Marie. You ask the DEA."

"Well where was he, what was he doing that would justify that?"

"I don't think it was voluntary. There were plenty of voluntary ways he could think up to leave the house for a couple of days. Lies he wouldn't bat an eyelid about telling. This was different, he was very apologetic afterwards, and before, something had happened, he had been poised to tell me something, maybe you even tell me the truth, and then he got a call on his phone. His second phone. And he walked out. So whatever it was, he didn't do it deliberately."

"What, you think he was abducted?"

Skyler shrugged.

"You never asked him this?"

"He wouldn't have told me even if I had, so."

"So the truth is just... Why don't you want to know the truth?"

"I don't know. At first because it was too hard to admit that he made it all up. Then because I knew he wouldn't tell me even if I asked him. And...because I was too scared and too ashamed. Because Hank went there looking for him, and I think he found him." She turned her head to look Marie in the eye for the first time.

"You think he was with that Tuco guy?"

Skyler didn't respond.

"Yeah, I've been wondering that. When he was found, he was really dehydrated, wasn't he? Like he'd been in the desert."

"Marie, I'm really sorry but you can try and piece together the facts or you want, you can mull it over in your head for as long as you like, and what you end up figuring out is never good - it's never conclusive anyway, and it's always frightening, so it is so much better if you just don't think about it."

Marie frowned.

"I don't actually know anything about it at all. I know that he took a call on his second phone and then he disappeared, and that later, after I found out what I was he was doing, I mentioned to him that I thought the fugue state was a fake and he didn't, you know...deny it. I don't know anything else. This is what I have to keep saying to the DEA and the APD. I don't actually know anything. And that's why it's better not to bother Flynn with it, because it would just hurt him for no reason, there would be no relief because I can't tell him what the truth is. I don't know what the truth is."

Filing this away into her files of disbelief and her disappointment in her sister, Marie shook her head and decided to move on. "I came because I wanna ask you about the blackmail. Because everything else… I know it must have been really hard for you to discover what Walt was doing, you said it broke your heart, and you kicked him out of the house, so obviously you weren't in favour of it, and then you said he came back against your will and he kept doing it against your will – I dunno why you wouldn't go to the police, I mean, that's what I would have done, but I do understand your argument for why you didn't, the stuff about Flynn and about, well, him, because he had a hold over you and you love him and he's very manipulative – I mean, I can't believe how manipulative that man is, he's like a puppet master. You know the reason Pinkman turned on Walt and was helping Hank? Because he found out that Walt poisoned a _child_ in order to convince Pinkman to help him kill Gus Fring. Did you know about that?"

Skyler shook her head slowly, her expression a mixture of terror and guilt.

"I mean, I can think of several instances where Walt told me things to manipulate me into thinking other things, and even more he did to Hank – with words, you know, he's certainly a wordsmith, but to poison a _child_ , oh my god, that is something else, the intricacy of the planning and the…the horror of the act."

"W-why…why did he?"

"To make it look like Fring did it. To make Pinkman think that Fring did it, and therefore turn Pinkman against Fring. Why would Fring poison a chi-why would anybody poison a child, it's just, it defies comprehension, but Walt, because he's the puppet master, he knew that was the thing that would push all the buttons for Pinkman, because he cared about this kid, apparently, it was his girlfriend's son or something."

"The ch…" Skyler swallowed. "The child…did…did he die?"

"No, but he was in ICU for ages, everybody thought he was going to die. So Pinkman said."

What Skyler had been hearing from the news reports and from the DEA had been getting worse and worse. What she got from the DEA made little sense, it was just horrifying snippets the agents used to try and shock information out of her during interviews, but the news was beginning to paint a clearer picture now of the sheer scale of destruction her husband had wrought. She had had no idea, no conception that anyone could be capable of doing such things, let alone someone she loved. The more she learned, the more horrified she became, and the more wracked with guilt and self-blame, but also with the gut-wrenching feeling that all the while she was pulling the wool over her family's eyes, _she_ was the one was really being had. _She_ was the one who was betrayed, lied to, led and manipulated more than anybody else.

She turned away from her sister, hunching forward, wishing she could stop breathing and fall straight down to hell.

"There's a lot that you didn't know, huh?"

Skyler made a strangled grunt.

"Yeah. Would you have helped him if you'd known?"

The noise was soft, high pitched, and bookended with tortured silences. But it was firm. "No."

"And when…Hank found out…He said he thought he'd come on too strong when he met you in the diner, he said that you were scared and in shock and you'd been under Walt's control for so long, so he defended you and your not helping him. He said he took his voice recorder out straight away, and I said, 'Oh Jesus, Hank, did you really? Way to put her on the spot!' We were trying to understand you, we really were.

"I was horrified to realise that _I_ hadn't spotted the problem with you, I mean, when I knew, when I was really worried about you because you just weren't right, and I was trying to help, I wanted to make things better for you, and I just went and talked to Walt about it! I left it up to him! I hated myself for doing that, for letting him be in charge of your welfare, and when I found out the truth and found out that you were still just here, just…still with him, it made me sick to think that he was still doing it to you, all of it, everything that had messed you up, and that you seemed to not…be able to escape. I mean, we would have helped you escape, but you wouldn't listen to us. And then when we went to Garduno's, I thought…I dunno what I thought would happen. But it wasn't _that._ "

Skyler nodded.

"I have been going through everything in my head over and over, I mean including from before we knew, everything from way back, and piecing your actions then with what you've told me now…and with Walt and what else was happening… I'm trying really hard to understand you, and I can get through a lot of it now, I can see how it happened – not why, but how - but that bit is where I trip up every time. I can't get past it, it stops me every time. I can see why Walt would do it, to cover his ass, because he has no conscience and just thinks it's fine to do things like that – in fact, for him, that was probably like _kindness_ for him, because instead of killing Hank right away he blackmailed him first, so it was like, 'Oh, I don't really wanna kill you so I'll just blackmail you – oh, you haven't backed off, OK, now I'll kill you.'"

Marie's tone had switched from understanding to biting. Skyler slid further down the sofa, emitting a quiet sob.

"With you, though, that's the part where I trip myself up every time. I can…not understand, but figure out the rest of it….but not that. It was cold and callous and I'm still terrified that someone is going to find some copy of that DVD, and that they…" she swallowed, "They might believe it, because Hank can't defend himself, and he was out there without back-up, without having called it in, without having told anyone other than Steve, who also can't defend him because-"

"No, that won't happen." Skyler was shaking her head vehemently. "I destroyed all the copies."

"What about the camera? And the computer, you must have burned the DVD on a computer!"

"I destroyed the SD card and I wiped the hard drive of my laptop, and I ripped the back of it open and took the hard drive out and destroyed it."

" _Your_ laptop."

"The DEA have it now, they took it when they did the search warrant, but they can't get anything off it because the hard drive is brand new. And they think I did that because the accounts of the car wash were on there. So they're not gonna question it."

"It was on _your_ laptop." For Marie, this was another knife in her back. Another reason she might never trust her sister again. "How did you destroy it?"

"I bashed the hard drive and the SD card with a rock, then I burned them in the barbeque until they were a little melted blob of metal and plastic, and I put that in a public trash can across town."

Marie's eyebrows rose in surprise. "You went to that length?"

"Well, just wiping it isn't enough, just reformatting….isn't enough, and also… I _did_ want to destroy the accounts of the car wash. I was in damage control too, remember. And there were a lot of things on that computer that would incriminate me."

"I thought you confessed to everything."

"Well this was earlier. Before it all blew up. After it blew up I wouldn't have been able to burn anything, they would have caught me, they-they would have known."

Marie frowned. "You destroyed the video before Hank was killed?"

"Well, there was the DVD. Walt wanted me to burn three DVDs – four, I think he said initially, so that he could hide them in different places or something, but I said no, we will burn two, one for us and one for them, and I kept hold of our copy the entire time and I destroyed it when you told me to."

"Oh, wonderful, Skyler. You were in charge of the whole thing."

"That was my condition. I said I would go along with it if _I_ did the filming and I made the tape on my computer. I never intended to keep more than one copy, and _I_ kept it, not Walt. I would've kept none if I could've gotten away with it, but that wouldn't have worked with Walt, he would have gone and done something else without me, and that wasn't the point – if I worked with him, I could rein him in. Limit the damage. Facts which have since come to light have revealed that I wasn't very good at that, but back then I still thought I was."

"So you never intended to use the video."

"Of course not."

"What about Walt?"

"Well he'd have needed my help to do it, I controlled all the copies. If he'd insisted, I would have just given him a blank DVD that looked the same. Or a blank SD card. He didn't know I destroyed the SD card and the hard drive."

Marie paused. "So it was Walt's idea?"

"Yeah."

"You didn't come up with the idea, and you only helped him so you could control how it was carried out."

"Yeah. But, same as you, I trip up on that every time I think about it. Well, that and not speaking to Hank in general. For everything else… I can't justify what I did but I can explain it, my reasons for it. But for that… Fear is the only reason I can…pinpoint. When Hank took out the voice recorder, he didn't know how involved I was… I was asking him for a lawyer and he was saying no. And I was afraid for _myself._ I'm ashamed of that, but I was, I was terrified. And… I was afraid for Walt and the kids, but… all I did was make it worse. I've always thought of myself as a very logical person, but that wasn't logical at all. As soon as Hank found out, it was game over. I knew what a good detective he was, so I should've known that. And if he couldn't find proof, well if he was any other cop, I probably could have just blackmailed him and left town and it _might_ have gone away. But he was my brother-in-law. You can't cut those ties…and he…was gonna sink too, he was gonna lose his job. He was trying to do what he could to make that better. And he wanted to control the damage for me…and the kids… and you, particularly, and I love you, Marie, so I should have…thought more about that. But mostly I was really afraid that we would lose everything, the business and the money and the house, and that all of Walt's shit would have been for nothing, and then the children would have had both their parents in prison. And that's another fear where the logical action _would_ have been to talk to Hank, to try and make a deal, to make the DEA think that I was helping… but I haven't been logical about any of this. Hank said that it was in my interests to come out ahead…. And I didn't."


	11. Chapter 11

Ramey hit 'send' on the email and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his hands over his tired eyes. He sat there not moving for a moment, and then stood slowly, grabbing his coffee mug from his desk and walking dejectedly towards the door. He stepped into the corridor to come face to face with Marie, one of a number of people he had been hoping to avoid that day. But he couldn't let her see that.

"Marie! Hi." He held out his hand. As she took it, he placed his other hand on her shoulder. "How are you?" He asked.

"Honestly? I'm not sure."

"Me too. Yep, I think you hit the nail on the head there. I was just going to get a coffee, would you like one?"

"Sure. Thank you."

"Ramey lead her along the corridor to the coffee station at the edge of the DEA kitchenette. Marie looked around the main office, her eyes focusing briefly on the photographs of her husband and Steve Gomez that were stuck to the wall at the far end of it next to the words, "For Hank and Steve." She saw an officer look up at them as he walked to his desk and sat down. Ramey re-emerged from the kitchen with two mugs, one of which he handed to Marie. His eyes followed hers. "I put that up to remind ourselves why we're doing it. We've all been putting in a lot of extra hours. For them."

"Oh." Marie nodded, and swallowed. She couldn't help thinking that it did not fill her with a lot of confidence.

"Step into…" said Ramey, and then stopped himself. "Step into Hank's office," he said.

Marie entered, her lips drawn into a thin line, and sat down, trying not to look at the rest of the room.

"What can I do for you?" asked Ramey.

"Not much, I expect," said Marie, looking down at her coffee mug. "I was just in the area, so." She took a sip.

"Well, we pulled a slippery little toerag out of hiding this morning. One of Saul Goodman's henchmen. He hasn't said much yet, but we're still working on it. His companion said quite a lot. That gives us some pull over him."

"His companion said quite a lot about what?"

"Well the two of them moved Walt's money from a storage unit to Goodman's office, and Walt took it from there to bury in the desert. We know that's what Hank and Steve were looking for, so we're going to follow them out there. The money is the best lead we have because it was the best lead they had, so we've been focusing quite a lot of attention on the storage unit and on a rental van that was used and the two men that were used to transport the money."

"Is that the storage unit that was rented by Skyler?" Marie asked.

"You know I can't discuss details of your sister's case with you."

"She told me APD questioned her about that on Sunday afternoon, are you telling me that that's all you've been focusing on for the past four days?"

"We're focusing on a lot of things, Marie, not least of which is finding Walter White, but aside from that, my personal priority is to find Hank and Steve. And the last thing they did was bury a fake barrel of money in your backyard. One of the men we questioned told us that he and his colleague took seven barrels of money from that storage locker and gave it to Walter White in the back of a rental van. We have the van, we have the company."

"Did the van have GPS?"

Ramey sighed. "No."

"No." Marie frowned. "Walt wouldn't have taken it if it did."

"The rental company told us that they'd already spoken to Steve, so he and Hank had that information. We figure, and I would put this down to Hank, because he was a man who was very good at turning a little creativity to find a way out of a situation, we figure that they buried the barrel in your yard to try and trick Walt into thinking that they - or rather, Pinkman - had found his stash. Actually they had no way of finding it whatsoever, but all they had to do was make him think that they had. That would explain his panicked sudden departure from the car wash. It looks like he rushed out there to try and get Pinkman away from it, and they followed him. That's how they found out where it was."

"He found the money," Marie breathed. "That's how he was able to arrest Walt, he found the money!"

"Only proof there was. And Hank would go straight for the proof. He was a damn good investigator."

"He found the money." Marie sat up in her chair, her pulse quickening with the excitement of the new information.

"The reason I haven't told you this yet, Marie, is we haven't found the money. As you can imagine, looking for money in the desert is kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack, and unlike Hank, we don't have the option of just texting a fake image to Walt."

"Walt had a barrel with him. Flynn said, on the back of his truck there was a black barrel."

Ramey nodded. "Yep, Walt had one barrel. He's not going to go on the run without a stash of cash. But there were seven barrels - he must have left the other six out in the desert. Wherever they are, that's the last known whereabouts of Hank and Steve."

"And you have no idea where that is."

"I'm sorry, Marie. We'll keep looking and following any and all leads that we can."

"Somewhere in the desert is the best you can do?"

"We know they were in To'hajiilee. We traced the cars along the freeway, and Hank had a lock on Walt's phone, he got hold of the phone number of Walt's secret second cell phone, and he had a trace on it. Last call made on it was a long call, between Walt and we think Pinkman. Cell phone towers show it started in the area of the car wash and ended in the area of To'hajiilee, but not long after he entered the reservation cell phone reception cut out and the call dropped. To'hajiilee is not one of the biggest reservations, but his car had been off road, so it could have been anywhere. We just have to go over that desert with a fine-tooth comb. And that's what the tribal police are doing now."

Marie nodded sadly. All that excitement for... not much at all. Information Hank and Steve had had two weeks ago, and the DEA were only just catching up now. Two weeks. Marie gave a sharp gasp as she realised how long it had been.

"We're doing everything we can," said Ramey kindly.

"Yeah, I better let you get back to it." Marie stood and moved towards the door, and then paused. She turned. "Can I ask you something about Skyler?"

"You think I'm going to say yes? Only if it's incredibly non-specific."

"She doesn't seem to know anything."

Ramey shook his head. "That is one of the two worst things about my job right now."

"She really doesn't, then?"

"My most willing witness doesn't know a damn thing. She was either very stupid or very trusting or very much under a spell. Either way, to us she's quite useless."

"You're calling her a witness?"

Ramey closed his mouth rather quickly. "No," he clarified. "No, she's an accomplice. And I can't say anything more."


	12. Chapter 12

It was in their eyes everywhere she went.

Sometimes it was surprise, sometimes it was idle curiosity, sometimes it was fear, sometimes it was guardedness, sometimes it was horror, some of them shrank away from her. Some of them crossed to the other side of the street or the other end of the store. Some left her vicinity altogether.

And then there were those who would say something.

"Is that her? Oh my god."

"The shame of it."

"Somebody take that little girl away from her."

"How do you sleep at night?"

"The blood of our young people is on your hands, yours!"

"If I was in your family, I think I'd kill myself."

At first, she argued with them, protesting that she hadn't known the extent of it, or that she was sorry. Mostly saying she was sorry. But that only ever made things worse. Soon she learnt that the best thing for her to do when she was out in public was to look down and never make eye contact with anyone.

One Friday afternoon, Skyler and Holly were lining up for the checkout at Albertsons with a shopping cart modestly filled with some random sale items and quite a number of essentials which Skyler had allowed to run out while she was waiting for her food stamps application to come through.

Holly was sitting in the child seat of the shopping cart. It was busy, so lines were long, and next to them, also sitting in the child seat of a shopping cart, and holding an Elmo doll, was a little boy of about Holly's age. The two looked at each other with wide eyes, beginning to engage in the sort of non-verbal communication that only one so small can. He smiled, and so did she. He laughed, and held out his hand. Skyler watched them. The boy's mother was talking on her phone and paying no attention. Skyler moved her shopping cart a little closer so that the hands of the two toddlers could touch.

She first entered the boy's mother's periphery at that point. He held up his Elmo doll and bounced it up and down. Holly smiled wider and clapped. He held it out to her.

As her daughter held out her hand to touch the Elmo, Skyler heard it.

"Oh my god. Can you hold the line for a sec?" The woman pulled the phone away from her ear. "Hey! What are you doing?"

"They're just playing." Skyler looked around and smiled at the woman, and immediately regretted it.. She had been so charmed by the kids that she had let her guard down and forgotten that she should be looking down.

Holly had made contact with the Elmo. The woman grabbed it faster than she and the little boy could blink. Both looked up in confusion.

"Get away!" the woman yelled. "What are you doing to my son?"

Other shoppers began to look at them as they heard the commotion. Everywhere around, Skyler could feel heads turning towards her, and hear gasps and murmurs. "That's Skyler White!" she heard one shopper whisper." The line ahead of her stopped moving as the shop assistant froze with her mouth open.

Skyler's first Instinct was to defend herself. "Nothing," she said calmly. "He was interacting with my daughter."

"I don't want either of you anywhere near him." The woman picked her son up and turned away, lifting her phone back to her ear. "Sarah, Skyler White's here in the supermarket! She had her eyes on Benny!"

"You get away from him!" yelled an older woman two shoppers ahead in the line.

"I wasn't -"

Another woman grabbed the hand of her middle school-aged son and pulled him away to another line. The boy stared at Skyler as he passed her.

She saw a security guard approaching, and decided it was now or never. "Actually, it's innocent until proven guilty in this country," she said loudly and firmly.

The bubble burst. All of a sudden, everybody had something to say.

"Stay away from the children!"

"You should be in prison!"

"What's she doing here? This is a nice neighbourhood!"

"Wow, she's really let herself go."

"My neighbour's son died of a drug overdose!"

"Could you pay my bill, please? You rich bitch."

The security guard arrived, but this only caused the cacophony to become even louder as various shoppers tried to tell him to eject Skyler from the store.

Skyler looked down. Her eyes met Holly's. The child looked at her for a moment in deep and heartbreaking confusion, and then looked up at her young friend with his Elmo, who waved at her over his mother's shoulder as she pulled him and their shopping cart away to another aisle.

"Could I just go through the checkout down the end?" Skyler asked the security guard, pointing at an empty station suitably removed from other shoppers. "Or the service checkout? I just want to get out of your hair."

The manager arrived.

"Hey Mr Holman, could you open Register 9?" asked the security guard. "I'll escort her through."

"Are you Skyler White?" asked the manager.

"My name is not relevant to this transaction," said Skyler firmly. "I just want to do my shopping."

"I have to ask you to leave."

"What? I haven't done anything."

"Really? You tell the DEA that?"

"In this store I have done nothing except select grocery products which I will now pay for at the counter. I have as much right to do that as anybody else."

"You're causing a scene. You need to leave."

"I am not causing a scene, I did nothing, these people just started yelling at me!"

"Your presence here is causing a scene. In case you haven't noticed."

"If you open the end register, I will be out of here inside five minutes."

"No. You're out of here right now." He grabbed a sign from behind the counter. On one side, it said, 'We have no public restrooms.' On the other, it said, 'Management maintains the right to refuse service to anyone.'

"Get out," he said.

Skyler's voice began to wobble as her strength wavered. "You have no idea what hell my life is. Please, I'm just trying to feed my kids."

The manager shrugged. "Heisenberg's spawn can starve," he said. "I got two nephews in rehab and my best friend's daughter was bashed to death by her meth-crazed boyfriend. Escort her out, Joe."

The security guard waited for Skyler to pick up Holly and her handbag, and then placed his hand gently on her shoulder to push her out of the store.

"Have a nice day," said the manager.


	13. Chapter 13

Flynn arrived home from school at the usual time, but didn't hear the usual greeting from his mother. He thought she wasn't home. Her car was there, but maybe the DEA had come and taken her in their car. He was hungry, so he looked in the fridge and found that there was even less there than there had been. There was no cheese, no bread, no chips, no eggs...he picked up an old green apple, looked at it, and put it back down again.

Then he heard a noise in the backyard, a very small noise, not something he would ordinarily have noticed, except that it was followed by a childish gasp from his sister. He looked out the kitchen window and saw her sitting at a child's table in the yard, drawing with crayons, one of which she'd dropped, which was what had made the noise, and she continued to make childish grunting noises as she picked it up, before going back to her drawing, deep in concentration.

Flynn's heart leapt into his throat, his eyes desperately flicking around the yard until he saw that his mother was also there, sitting in one of the patio chairs, which was positioned oddly at the edge of the yard, not far from Holly but not looking like it had been deliberately placed in any which way. She was right behind Holly, actually, from Flynn's perspective, but when he first looked he didn't see her because she wasn't moving at all. The look on her face was at once vacant and devastated. She looked older than he ever seen her, and her expression was harrowing to him.

"Mom!" he called, moving quickly around the counter towards the back door. She didn't react until she heard it slide, her expression being replaced by one of surprise, and then, quickly, a wafer-thin smile. "I didn't hear you come in," she said softly.

"I called out to you. A few times."

"Sorry." Skyler rose. "Hey, can you do me a favour?"

"Yeah."

"We badly need groceries. Can you go and get some for me? You can take my car, here you go." She handed him the car keys. "I'll give you a list."

Looking around, she grabbed a piece of paper and crayon from in front of Holly.

"Get the cheapest brands on everything. I'll give you $50. It won't go far. You might have to…" She paused, and her facade fell for a moment as she closed her eyes and rubbed her fingers across them. "Use the calculator on your phone to add up what everything costs as you're going around, so you know how much you have left to spend. If the $50 won't cover all of this, you can cross out... the carrots and the coffee. It should cover it, though. If there's anything over, after you've got all this, get some more of the..." She looked up at him for the first time. "Ah… if there's anything left over, get something for yourself. Whatever you like." She held out the list and the money.

Flynn took it slowly, looking at her intently.

Skyler read the look and relaxed her face muscles. "How was your day?" She smiled, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Are you alright?"

"Yeah. You?"

"Yeah."

"Ok, well go on, because there's nothing in the cupboards and I can't cook dinner until we have food."

Flynn looked down at the list. "There's no meat on the list," he said.

"No, there isn't. Sorry, honey. Take a look at the prices when you're there, if there's something that's been drastically marked down, maybe you could swap it for the coffee or the cheese."

Flynn turned and walked back to the front door.

A gust of wind blew through the yard, and Skyler shivered. The wind chimes jangled as a second guest blew one of Holly's drawings into the pool. Skyler didn't notice.

….

"Mom, did something happen today?"

Skyler placed some cabbage leaves on Flynn's plate, saying nothing.

"Are you ok?"

"Yeah. I'm fine. I can't say my life doesn't suck, but I'm fine with that."

"Y-you don't deserve to have your life suck."

"Actually, I do. You're the one who doesn't."

"No, you…you don't. Neither of us do."

"I do and I'm dealing with it. You don't have to worry."

"Are you serious? 'Y-you don't have to worry?' That's what you going to…say to me right now?"

Skyler looked at him, swallowing a mouthful of water slowly and deciding not to reply.

"I am worried. I'm worried…about you because you have completely changed e-everything about yourself. Well, no, not everything, th-the only thing I recognise is that fake voice and f-fake smile you put on before when you were asking me to get the groceries, a-and I realised that that…was the way you've been for the last entire… like…entire year. And if…that's what you were doing then, th-then everything you've done for the past year has been fake. You've been showing me a fake…face, f-fake everything, fake words, f-fake emotions -"

"Yes, Flynn, you know that. I was lying to everybody."

"I'm not talking about…lying, not in the meaning of the words, I mean th-the way that you are, your emotions, your entire, your entire…everything about you. E-everything about you for the past year has been fake. A-and I'm so sorry that I didn't pick up on…any of it, I just di-didn't get it at all, but now I do, alright, so I want you to stop it."

"You didn't…Flynn, you don't need to –"

"I want you to s-stop being fake around me. I want you to let me help."

"I let you help with the groceries today and you did a really good job, and I really really needed that, so thank you."

Flynn groaned. "Don't patronise me!"

"I'm not, I'm really not, I really needed your help, you have no idea. Things fell on top of me a bit today."

"Oh really, yes, thank you for admitting that, y-yes things did get on top of you today, and w-when I ask you if you are ok I want you to tell me the truth!"

Skyler nodded, finished a mouthful, and took a breath. "Would it really make any difference?"

"What?"

"If I went around telling people how I really feel, would they actually be able to do anything to help me? They wouldn't. And I would rather not have you worry any more than you already have to. And as long as I am putting on a brave face I can handle a lot more than I could if I decided to just let it all go and go cry in a corner. That's not how you get through things. You get through things by being strong."

"Yeah, I know, but y-you also have to talk about things. You can't be s-strong all the time, you can be strong outside, but…sometimes when you're at home, l-like you said, it all falls on top of you, and at that point it is better, r-rather than going through that alone, to tell someone who cares."

"And say what? My life sucks, can I have a hug?" She smiled.

"S-stop with the fake smiles! But yes, yeah, that will be fine, at least that…acknowledges the problem, r-rather than just saying, 'I'm fine.' A-and then I would give you a hug and that would help."

"Yeah. It would." She slid her chair towards him and put her arms around him. He held her strongly, bringing his arms around to stroke her back briefly, and then grip harder.

She gripped him pretty hard too. "Yeah," she said, her voice muffled. "Definitely helps. Thank you." She pulled away, kissed him on the cheek and went back to her food.

"Mom? I-I really... I really… I-I owe you an apology."

"What for?"

"Everything. I-I was really horrible to you, a lot of times. A-and even when I wasn't doing that I just w-wasn't even trying to understand, I never even asked you if you were ok."

"When?"

"Really? I think you know when. Especially w-when you were trying to break up with Dad, which I now realise was an…excellent idea and something I s-should have helped you with, but I refused to even…try to understand why you were doing it a-and I was…actually really h-horrible to you as well. And I'm sorry."

"That's ok." Skyler squeezed his hand.

"I didn't…didn't mean it, even at the time I didn't, but I just didn't understand a-and that's no excuse, because I sh-should have just asked you. You wouldn't have told me, but I should have…at least…tried and just d-done something to let you know that I care and I don't -"

"I know. That's ok. Don't worry. I didn't tell you, that's the thing. So it's my fault."

"No it's not, I mean y-yes it is, because you should have asked for help and trusted...your family to help you because we care, b-but... I just wish I'd tried to understand you. I didn't…even try, I just took Dad's side e-every single time!" His voice broke. "And you d-don't deserve that and you deserve to have me support you, and –"

"No, no, no." Skyler pulled her chair around to be next to him, and put her arm around him. "Two things. Firstly, you are very very young. And nobody can read human emotions or understand complex relationships until you're a bit older. Two, I was actively not telling anybody anything. Aunt Marie asked me why a thousand times, and I wouldn't say anything. Which is my fault, I know. And she couldn't figure it out, so if an adult couldn't figure it out, then I think you're off the hook."

"But she asked you. And she gave you s-support. I didn't."

"Flynn, you're in high school! You don't have to do that sort of thing yet."

"That doesn't m-mean I have to be mean to you! I even called you a-a bitch one time."

"Yeah."

"You remember that. Because it was really horrible of me."

"I didn't blame you then and I don't blame you now."

"Mom, w-will you just shut up and let me apologise? I'm trying to say that I'm sorry. F-for all of that. I sorry."

"That's ok, baby. You know it wasn't your fault, right? Everything that happened had nothing to do with you."

"Yeah I know, it was Dad's fault."

"And mine."

"S-stop blaming yourself. It was Dad."

"Remember when you told me that if I went along with it I was just as bad as him?"

"Yeah, that was j-just me...being an asshole and not understanding again. I'm really sorry."

"You were right."

"I wasn't right. He killed people and made drugs, a-all you did was run a car wash."

"I let him keep doing it."

"No you didn't, h-he just didn't listen to you. He was…manipulating you into doing…what he wanted and keeping…quiet and laundering his money, and you can't even see that now, I know y-you can't see how much he was controlling you. Y-you think it was your decision and it wasn't."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because I know now what a controlling person he is! H-he manipulated me all the time, I can see it clearly when I look back on it, can't you? I know you l-like to think that you were making your own decisions and i-in control of things, but you weren't. B-believe me."

"When did he manipulate you?"

"Like buying me a car! Or just being 'oh, p-poor me, I have cancer' all the time! H-he didn't use to do that, when he first got…cancer he would n-never say anything about it and would never admit any w-weakness, and then recently suddenly he's talking about it, s-saying that he passed out and stuff, w-which is the kind of admission of weakness that he… _never_ would have done before, b-but he was doing it to make _me_ feel sorry for him! To make m-me want to take care of him and not question him!"

"When did he pass out?"

"I-I don't know, I didn't see him, that's the point! H-he didn't use to tell me w-when things like that happened that I didn't see! H-he said it was how he got that cut on his face. I don't know what's worse, h-him lying and saying the petrol pump exploded or him telling the truth about passing out just so that I will…feel sorry for him and won't question anything that he's doing!"

"Parents do manipulate their kids sometimes. I'm sorry but sometimes it's necessary. When you were little, you always used to insist on having 3 bedtime stories, even though you knew perfectly well that you were only allowed to have two, and I never used to give into it, but sometimes your father would, and he would read you three. And before I knew it you had completely rewritten the rules and you expected to have three bedroom stories every night, and then when you asked for more, it would be four or five stories that you would like, and that just wasn't possible, that wasn't practical at all because it was getting late and you would have been really grumpy the next day if you didn't get enough sleep. I think I caught him reading you four once, but he never gave in to five. But he had trouble saying no to you, he really did. So what he would do is he would say to you, 'OK, sure, you can have a fourth or fifth story, but just give me a minute.' And then he would make up some excuse, like he had to go and get his dressing gown because he was cold, or he really wanted a glass of milk, and he would leave the room, knowing full well that by the time he got back, you would be asleep. And you fell for it every single time. But it was necessary because you can't reason with a young child that you can't have another story, that you have to go to sleep or else you'll be very grumpy in the morning. Nobody will be happy if you don't have enough sleep, but you can't reason with a child, so sometimes you have to use other alternative methods to get them to do what you want so that life can continue to run smoothly."

"Gr-great. So you're telling me that my Dad has been m-manipulating me for my entire life."

"No, me as well. You wait until Holly gets old enough to argue with me and give me cheek, you will see me manipulate her a lot. There are books about it."

"Gee, thank you! Why are you telling me this?"

"I'm just saying that your father didn't mean anything by it. He loves you so much, and actually he would have really loved to have read you a fourth or fifth story, but he also needed to take care of you by letting you get enough sleep. He loves you, and I know that you won't always understand how or why he did what he did to other people, but you he always took great care of, and I want you to remember that. He loves you so much and he never did anything against you. Some things a parent does don't always make sense, but there's always a reason for it."

"You're delusional."

"Alright, maybe the bedtime story analogy doesn't completely match up, but he never did anything against you and you can't deny that."

"Mom. Are you hearing what I'm saying? He's still m-manipulating you even now."

"I know you're angry, which is completely understandable, and I think it is very sweet of you to blame him and not me. But your first reaction was to say that because I went along with it I'm as bad as him, and that is true. And if you can see through that and still be nice to me, because I'm your mother and you love me, I am very grateful. I am so so grateful for that, you have no idea. Thank you. But you should do the same for him."

"When I said that, it was b-before we got home that day. It was before... It was before I saw the real him."

Skyler shook her head adamantly. "That wasn't the real him. It wasn't. He was panicking."

"Mom."

"He didn't mean to take Holly, he didn't mean to hurt her. He loves you more than anything. He was panicking."

Flynn looked down, and let out a long breath. Skyler stroked his hair. Then he looked up. "He's still manipulating you even now."

"Give me some credit. I dug my own hole."

"Why are you defending him?"

"I'm not. What he did... What he did to other people was horrible, and I wouldn't do it, and if I'd known the extent of it when I was helping him, I wouldn't have helped him. But he never did anything against you. And you love him so much, you can't deny that, you can't turn it off - I know you're trying to, but it won't work. All I'm saying is don't forget that."

"Damn right I can turn it off. I already have, he's dead to me. Because he killed Uncle Hank."

"You don't know that. Nobody knows that."

"Well wha-what else could have happened, Mom? Uncle Hank arrested him, he…had him in handcuffs, a-and then all of a sudden Uncle Hank is gone, like n-no-one has seen him since, he's definitely dead, and Dad, i-immediately afterwards, he's r-running around the house grabbing all our stuff and telling us we have to get th-the hell out of here, and then he l-leaves us just to run away from the police so that…th-they won't arrest him for murder! Be…cause he's a coward and he can't even face that he did it!"

"I don't think he did it. I think there was someone else there."

"You can be in denial if you want, but –"

"We know that Jesse Pinkman was there. He's a nasty piece of work, he tried to burn our house down a couple of weeks ago. That's why there was really gasoline on the carpet."

Flynn's eyebrows rose, but he didn't respond. There wasn't much left that could shock him now.

Skyler closed her eyes. She hadn't meant to let that slip like that.

"Mom, please. Stop defending him. It's like y-you don't even see the truth when you look at him. He…killed Uncle Hank, and he abducted Holly, whi-which she keeps waking up screaming about, and he manipulated…you into betraying what you believe in and doing h-horrible things that you can't forgive yourself for, and now you're this... you're this broken sad eyed person with no ... you've got no… you've got nothing but fake smiles and this steel wall you put up all the time s-so people can't see how much you're hurting. And he did that to you."

"I did it to myself. I can't forgive myself, you're right. That's what you see in me now. It's guilt."

"Guilt that he put on you! And skipped town and left you to face! I know y-you did stuff too, but you wouldn't have done if it weren't for him! And…n-no I will not forgive him for that, I don't care h-how much I used to look up to him before, when he m-murders my uncle, traumatizes my sister, b-breaks the heart of my aunt, and tramples my mom into little tiny pieces that-that are a shadow of what she was before, I will never forgive him for that, and I can turn e-everything I ever felt from him off at that moment and say n-no way will I ever forgive you, will I…ever speak to you or say or e-even hear nice things about a…person like that, he is dead to me, he is the worst kind of bastard to e-ever walk the Earth, and the only reason you're still saying nice things about him is that he…got into your head so d-deeply that he's still manipulating you now, and that makes me sick. N-no I don't love him and I never will again, and my entire…childhood is ruined now because e-every single memory I have of it has him in there! Ho-Holly is really lucky that she doesn't have to grow up with him!"

Skyler's wide eyes looked at her son as tears welled up and dripped down her face, becoming bigger and faster as he continued talking. He finally stopped, and the two of them looked at each other, his breathing hard and angry, hers shallow and desperate.

"Except that she won't grow up with Uncle Hank either." His hard-set face crumbling, Flynn looked away.


	14. Chapter 14

Ultimately, Marie realised that there was nothing she could do or hear or understand that would make anything better, so she decided to give up trying and just keep going through the motions of life. Most of the time she didn't feel much. It was easier not to.

She went through the motions of helping her sister too. She did it of course, she offered to lend money because Skyler's bank accounts were frozen, and she offered to have them stay with her if Skyler couldn't find anywhere else. She helped because they were family and she would never not help them. The kids meant the world to her, and Skyler… Skyler she'd always adored. She understood what she'd been saying about hating and loving someone at the same time. That was there. But mostly, she felt nothing, because it was easier that way. It was easier to do than to talk. She talked to Dave…a bit. She tried to talk to Skyler early on, but her hunger for "Tell me why, tell me now!" disappeared as soon as she realised it couldn't ever help. Nothing would ever be better, and the more Skyler told her about Walt the more Marie too came to feel that she was afraid to know more.

What helped was doing things. So she did things. She took care of Holly while Skyler was out looking for work, she went with Skyler to look at houses and, more often than not, went alone when Skyler was either at the DEA or at a job interview. After being rejected by more and more potential employers, her searching became more desperate and Marie told her she'd focus on the house hunt while Skyler focussed on the job hunt.

More and more, it felt like Skyler was the one holding back from Marie, not the other way around. Like she'd promised, she explained everything she could, answered any questions, threw in extra facts as they came up, but for the first time ever, their relationship was unequal. Skyler had done something truly unforgivable, something that lowered her far into the ground she wished would swallow her up every time people stared at her in the street and the supermarket. But Marie had offered her help and support her in spite of it, actively going to speak to Ramey to advocate on her behalf, helping with the house hunt, buying groceries, helping with the kids, and in doing so she had raised herself far higher than she had ever been before. Every time Marie did or offered to do something for her, Skyler would look at her dumbly, unable to fathom why she would help someone who had destroyed her entire life. She would shower her in thank yous and apologetic "Oh, you don't have to do that"s, which Marie accepted but all the time felt that Skyler was holding something back, that what she was saying didn't sound right – it didn't sound right for her to be always lowering herself, apologising and thanking – that wasn't Skyler, Skyler had always oozed confidence in Marie's eyes but now…now, she was a shadow. She could still turn on fake confidence in job interviews and fake wellness around her children, but as she was now hiding nothing from Marie, what Marie saw was a shell of the strong woman her sister used to be. She was still strong, certainly, because she had to go out every day and keep searching for a job and keep answering the DEA's questions and keep answering her son's questions and keep showering her daughter with love and keep apologising to her sister… but the light had gone out in her eyes.

The light in Marie's eyes went out too, when she lost Hank. But she found that doing things made her feel better and, when they were successful, better still, which is why when she came to 308 Negra Arroyo Lane the day before it was to be vacated with a triumphant look in her eyes, holding aloft a debit card, she had a smile on her face.

"There you go!" she announced proudly, handing the card to Skyler.

Skyler recognised the bank, it was the bank she had put her "emergency money" into, an account Walt didn't know about and which she had deliberately kept clean, free of any ill-gotten money. She'd set it up when she'd been planning to kick Walt out of the house and had used it a lot right after that, but there was never enough money (as they'd never had enough money, of the legitimate kind) and as she gradually slipped into allowing him to use the dirty money to pay for things for the family, and then into using it herself to pay for things for the family, and then into actively participating in its processing and storage, she hid the card for her "legitimate" account along with a stash of emergency cash behind her chest of drawers. This was one of the stashes that the DEA had found during their initial execution of a search warrant, so they had taken the card weeks ago.

She refused to accept a dime from Marie, and Marie knew better than to ask how she was still putting food on the table. Marie noticed that the food was lesser, and bought healthy groceries every so often to compensate. But she'd been arguing a strong case with Ramey on more than one occasion for the release of the hold on the legitimate account, as the federal agents tasked with going through Skyler's finances with a fine-toothed comb could find no record of dirty money ever entering the account or indeed the bank, as Skyler had deliberately made the account with a different institution entirely from all her other finances. All transactions ever made on the account were backed up and squeaky clean.

Skyler had made a tearful plea to the DEA agents herself, on the day she realised _all_ her bank accounts had been frozen, all, including that one. They denied her, of course, still hoping that if they held as much over her as possible she would magically come up with the new information their grossly inadequate blue meth investigation lacked. She kept using the dirty money, telling no-one, and trying harder and harder to find a job, which, when you have a toddler to take care of, are the subject of a police investigation that could call you away for questioning at any moment, and are all over the news as public enemy number 2, was a task that was almost impossible.

Marie kept working on it, gradually picking away at Ramey, even doing some of the leg work for him with the bank to make the account completely open and visible to the law in real time, whilst still keeping the money accessible for Skyler. Finally, he gave in.

"Now the DEA is watching every transaction on there, they had the bank set up a…a…I dunno what they call it, some kind of watch…live alert thing, anyway, Ramey insisted on that, which I told him was invasive and victimising but he wouldn't back down on that. But as long as you're just using it for the essentials, it should be fine. And when you get a job, you can get them to pay into that account." Marie smiled, and Skyler hugged her, breathing a huge sigh of relief.

"Thank you," she breathed, her voice muffled by Marie's shoulder. "I have good news too. I got a job."

"Oh YAY!" Marie jumped excitedly.

"Oh thank god," said Skyler, in the soft monotone she used most of the time these days.

"Does that mean you can take the place on Montgomery?"

"No, that one's too expensive."

"Too expensive? That was one of the cheapest I found – well, apart from that awful one on the other side of the river – that neighbourhood was sketchy as, I will not let you take the kids there."

Skyler shook her head, lighting up a cigarette.

"Oh jeez, can you do that outside, please? What about your daughter?"

"She's down for a nap." Skyler grabbed the baby monitor and walked out to the yard, where there was now no furniture, so she sat on the retaining wall.

"Just because she's not in the room right now, does not mean that she is not affected by the smell of cigarette smoke when she comes back!"

"Smoking is the least of the things I hate myself for, but I can't stop, so."

"Yes you can, you did before!"

"Sure, when I was happy and young and about to start a family."

"A family which you now have! Who do not benefit from your smoking! I include myself in that – this whole place stinks, Skyler."

"Good job we're leaving, then." Skyler took a long puff.

"OK, so, not Montgomery, well, OK, we'll keep looking. You've downsized a _lot_ , I can't believe how empty this place looks even when it's stacked with boxes. You won't need a storage unit, they'll all fit in my spare room easily. Ooh, I did see an ad today for a place in Osuna Park that-"

"I can't afford Osuna Park."

"You have a job now!"

"I haven't told you what it is yet. It's $8.50 an hour, 15-25 hours per week, they couldn't guarantee me regular days or hours."

Marie's face fell. "Oh."

"That's all I could get. There's nothing else. They're willing to be flexible for Holly and Flynn, and….I think they recognised me but didn't commented on it, so… that's progress."

"Where is this job?"

"Central Taxis. Downtown."

"You're gonna be a cab driver?"

"No, I'll be in the dispatch office. Taking calls, sending cabs out." Skyler stubbed out her cigarette and stood up.

"Oh, OK, well, that's good, if you're in the office, maybe you can pick up extra hours doing their books."

Skyler stopped in the doorway and turned around, shaking her head vehemently. "I've been deregistered now. I'll never be able to do that again."

"Dereg…deregistered? What register, do you need to be registered to do math for people?"

"Yes you do. It's an IRS requirement. They won't let me do that job ever again." She walked into the kitchen, where an open box marked "kitchen" sat on the counter. She began taking things out of cupboards and putting them inside. There were piles of boxes throughout the house, but less than there should have been to show for almost 17 years of family life, because Skyler had sold a lot of it already. Flynn's friend Lewis had suggested they auction Walt's things on eBay as "property of Heisenberg", to increase their value. Flynn liked the idea, but Skyler said no, and threw most of them in the trash in a fit of fury and despair about two weeks back.

"Where's your dining table?" asked Marie.

"I sold it."

"Don't you think you're gonna need that?"

"Anywhere we can afford to live is gonna be too small for a table like that."

Marie wandered through the empty house.

"Do you want something to drink? I'm making myself a hot chocolate. It's cheap crap, but I'm trying to drink it instead of wine. It's a lot cheaper, and…less destructive."

"Sure. Chocolate is good, it releases endorphins and gives you energy. I think you're losing weight, Skyler, are you eating any more, like, at all?"

Skyler decided it was best not to answer that. She didn't feel like eating most days, and she figured that since that lessened the grocery bill it was a good thing. "Yes," she replied simply. "I am."

"Alright, let me help you pack. What else have you got to do?"

"Just the kitchen. And I'm gonna concoct an experimental meal later from everything that's left in the fridge. If you're interested."

"Sounds like what we used to put in my Easy-Bake Oven," said Marie, assembling an empty box and beginning to put pots in it. "I'm in. Oh, we're gonna need these…"

"I'm gonna use that one," said Skyler, pointing at a large pot sitting on the stove. "I've put a few things aside to use tonight and tomorrow morning. Everything that's still in the cupboards can be packed."

They worked silently for a while, each occasionally glancing at the other, but never at the same time.

"You don't have to help, Marie," said Skyler. "I mean, as always, I really appreciate it, but you don't have to."

"I have nothing better to do. If I go home all I'll do is stare at four walls and think about the fact that it's been more than a month now."

Skyler stopped moving briefly, looking at her sister and then, unable to come up with anything to say, going back to wiping out shelves. It had, indeed, been more than a month now since Hank's death. The unhappy anniversary had come three days earlier, and Flynn had spent the night at Marie's, but Skyler had stayed behind, not knowing, as ever, what to say to her sister, or what she could do that would possibly help.

"So, Skyler," Marie broke her reverie by changing the topic. "What I really don't get – I mean one of many things that I really don't get, but this one is a more practical, logical one that I would have thought you, as a practical, logical person would have done a lot better at. You… never seem to be surprised by anything that's been happening. You weren't surprised when they froze your accounts – in fact you planned for it, in keeping your one legitimate one – you weren't surprised when they took the cars and the house, you knew it would happen and you said that fear of losing the house was one of the fears that made you not want to help Hank; you weren't surprised that it was really hard for you to find a job; you're not surprised that you've lost this business registration thingy… you're looking for small poky houses in sketchy areas because that's all you expect you can afford – you don't seem surprised by any of this, you just go along and just expect it all to happen, you-you never recoil or say, 'Hey, that's not right', or… You just expected this all to happen."

"No I didn't."

"That's what it looks like, you're just walking around, not reacting to anything!"

"I don't have a visible reaction to most things because I've hit rock bottom, Marie. There's nothing I can say or do to change any of it, I just have to accept it, because I deserve it and that's how it should be, so."

"You're an intelligent woman, though, I mean you've always been good at researching and planning and doing things right, you know, which you obviously did with the money laundering too because between you and me, the impression I am getting from the DEA, when they are going through the books from the car wash, they are having real trouble delineating what was Walt's money and what wasn't, I mean you hid it really well. Which in one sense makes you look more guilty, but in another makes it a lot harder for them to prove it – well, except that you confessed to it, obviously.

"What I don't get, though, is given that you did all this planning and calculating and research and making sure you did everything really thoroughly - and given that now you are not surprised by anything that's happening – you must have already known everything that was at stake. You knew you'd lose your house. You knew you'd lose your livelihood. You knew you'd have no money to feed yourself properly or to put Flynn through college – the latter being something which I know is particularly important to you. You must have known all that, I mean do you deny it, do you deny knowing that that was what you were risking?"

"No."

"So why risk it? Why do it?"

"I didn't have a choice, Marie."

"Oh, and aside from the risk of going to prison, obviously!"

Skyler sealed a full box and picked it up. "I don't know what to say." She took the box into the living room and placed it with the piles of other boxes that were sitting where the second sofa and arm chair used to be.

"You hate risk, Skyler! And you were always so good at planning your finances! I don't understand."

"Well yes, that's why I was so thorough with the money laundering, because I didn't want to get caught. I knew what was at risk."

"Yeah, but if you had just not done the money laundering, the risk would have been so much lower! I mean, you'd decided you weren't going to dob Walt in because you weren't able to, couldn't go through with it – whatever – so then the chances of him getting caught on his own if you _don't_ do the money laundering go up significantly. But the chances of _you_ being prosecuted obviously go down! I mean, you could have even claimed ignorance, you could have said he told _you_ the gambling story! You would have still lost his money and everything he bought with it, the cars and _maybe_ the house, given he was making stupidly incautious mortgage repayments without your consent but, if you could argue that that was without your knowledge, that you didn't know what he was doing and you were just an ordinary working mother trying to pay the mortgage legitimately - you could have kept your job at Benneke's and paid it from that, I mean they had to give you that account back with the money from Benneke's in it because it was legitimate, and you would have stood a far greater chance of keeping the house if you could use the same argument! You could have said that you kicked Walt out because of the gambling, and he was really pushy with you, he kept coming back, kept trying to give you money, but you had no knowledge of where it was from and you just kept your job and kept paying the bills from that – I mean, I know Benneke's eventually went bankrupt, but you would have still had your accountancy registration thingy so you could have got another job doing that, and made a lot more than $8.50 an hour!"

"Yep." Skyler nodded.

"'Yep'? That's all you're gonna say?"

Skyler shrugged and shook her head, looking deeply uncomfortable. "I know. I go through that in my head every night. And every day. I should have just told you and you would have told me to do that and I should have taken your advice."

"You said that you wanted to protect everyone from the awful knowledge and the awful destruction it would cause. And it did cause. And you say that you hated what Walt was doing and that you felt trapped and like you had no way out. But laundering the money, that's a whole different ball game, that's not just turning a blind eye to what he was doing. That is you actively stepping up and…being a partner in it. And I don't understand why someone as cautious as you - and as intelligent as you, knowing what you knew about the risks – why you would do that."

"I told you. The money had to be clean for Hank's treatment."

"Yes I know, which you deliberately hid from us. Just tell us, Jesus. Tell me, tell him - we would have sorted you out."

"Then there wouldn't have been any money for the treatment."

"THAT is fine."

Skyler stopped moving, her eyes darting towards her sister, who kept packing up spices as if she had said nothing significant.

"Even when I tried to do something good, I completely messed it up. Had the complete opposite effect."

"Which wasn't deliberate I know, it got hijacked by Walt later with his evil blackmail idea. I'm just saying that in general, not lying to people and backing them into a corner is pretty logical and reasonable, and I thought you were logical and reasonable, that's all I'm saying. I know Walt isn't."

"Yeah, well, I'm just an extension of him, so." Skyler taped up another full box and carried it over to the pile.

"What? What makes you say that?"

"Just the way things worked out."

"What, so you're Mrs Heisenberg? Like they're saying?"

"I… I'm…" Tears came to Skyler's eye. "Yeah. I must be."

"If he walked in here now, what would you say?"

Skyler stood up from the pile and turned towards Marie, breathing deeply. "I'd let you do your worst," she said.

"Oh, well, I'd slap him and kick him and scream at him."

"That would be absolutely fair." Skyler moved back over to the kitchen and bent down to a lower cupboard, pulling out a dusty electric mixer in a box.

"Ok, but what would you say? If I wasn't here, and the two of you were alone, what would you say to him?"

Skyler placed the box on the counter with a sigh. "I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea how I would react."

"Seriously?"

Skyler shrugged. "I am so tired, I am so... I have no idea. I probably wouldn't waste my breath."

"You don't have things you want to scream at him?"

"I think 'I told you so' would be a little hollow under the circumstances."

Marie went silent, regretting having asked the question. Was this the way things were going to be now? Could she just not ask her sister things anymore? Was that the only way they could get along?

Not noticing Marie's distress, Skyler picked up the mixer box and took it to the pile with the others.

"Flynn would scream at him."

"Yep. He would."

"Why wouldn't you?"

"Because I already did, and it got me nowhere. That's what caused him to panic and abduct Holly."

"Oh, I'd make sure she was far away. In this hypothetical scene I'm constructing."

Skyler kept moving boxes, not paying much attention.

"You're an extension of him, what do you mean by that?"

Skyler met Marie's eyes for the first time in several minutes. "I'm just as bad, just as guilty, and I deserve just as much punishment."

"You haven't been charged with nearly what he would be."

"I let it happen. I didn't stop it. I would be a hypocrite if I yelled at him."

"You jumped in the pool, you were asking us for help."

"Pretty pathetic, right?"

"No, it wasn't. It was the most harrowing thing I ever saw."

"Oh." Skyler stopped what she was doing and put a hand on her sister's shoulder. "I'm sorry."

"No, don't be sorry, that was... That was what you felt you had to do. That was... all you had. You really thought that you couldn't actually talk to us, you had to do that."

Skyler shrugged. "Yeah."

"You had the evidence against him, you had the money. You could have put him in jail."

"It was never going to be that easy. Walt's always got a plan. He always knows what to do. I don't. Sometimes I think I do, but I always fail."

"You're afraid of him."

"The people who worked with. Him too, yes. Not in the same way, I'm afraid of his unpredictability more than anything else. But them... They could kill us. They've already threatened to multiple times. And that's just what I know about. And I don't even know who they are. That was my primary motivation that night. Fear. I just wanted the kids to be out of here."

Marie's eyes widened. "Who threatened you?"

Skyler turned back to the boxes, knowing she'd said too much. "Gus Fring," she said quietly.

"Really?"

"Why do you think Walt killed him?"

"The news said that was some kind of dispute between criminals, like a turf war or a…"

Skyler dropped to her knees and disappeared inside a corner cupboard, clearing things out of the back of it.

"Sky?"

"Well, the news wants to blacken Walt as much as possible, and they get their information from the DEA, who also want to blacken Walt as much as possible, but it couldn't have been a turf war, Walt what was working for Fring. Which they have said on the news, haven't they?"

"Why did Pinkman kill Boetticher, then?"

"That I don't know."

"Is that one of the many things you don't want to know?"

"Absolutely. "

"Skyler, when the stakes are this high, when people are getting killed, you need to kn-you can't turn a blind eye when -"

"Oh I know. That's why I asked Walt about it. About Boetticher. And the resulting conversation was one of the most terrifying of my life, and I only say 'one of the' because then soon after that Walt came home and told me that Fring had threatened to kill our entire family. Even Holly. And he said that we had to go, get out of here, he said he knew someone who could make us disappear."

"When was this?"

"And he had also threatened Hank, because Hank was investigating him and getting too close, and Walt had somebody place a call to the DEA to warn them about that, and they said it was the cartel, but it wasn't. It was Fring. And Walt's plan for us was to make us disappear, but it turned out we didn't have the money because to make four people disappear is quite expensive and we'd only just bought the car wash, so we went to your house because the DEA guard was there, and you were the only person who was taking the threat seriously, and everybody thought you were worrying unnecessarily, but you were absolutely right. You had no idea how right you were. And we were there to save our lives. So thank you, for worrying and insisting to the DEA that we go, because you saved our lives. Me and the kids."

Marie's mouth had fallen open so wide her chin was almost touching her chest. "Have you told the DEA this?" she asked.

"Yeah. They bomb swabbed this kitchen, they found traces of whatever explosive it was that killed Fring."

Marie was speechless. Skyler calmly finished packing another box, and taped it up. She lifted it and passed Marie to take it to the pile in the living room.

"I know, they did say that on the news… but they... they didn't... say…"

"Like I said, they're trying to blacken Walt as much as they can. And I can absolutely understand why, but in that instance, it was self-defence."

"Even Holly… _what_?"

"Yep. Every single one of us." Skyler looked around the kitchen, assessing whether there was anything left to pack. Marie just keep staring at her.

"It doesn't make what Walt did right. What Walt did was terrifying." Skyler leaned back against the stove, her facade finally breaking. "You know, all the time I was at your house, I was so scared, and then all of a sudden it was over, and Walt said 'I won', and we came back here... And somehow it got even worse. Because I hadn't known he was capable of that. I thought he was a school teacher trying to make some extra money. Some small time idiot who'd bitten off more than he could chew. But that. That was when it really got bad."

"You didn't look scared when you were at our house."

Skyler gave half a smile and she nodded, then looked away so that Marie wouldn't see the tears in her eyes.

Marie saw them, but didn't know if they were real. She shook her head, her mouth opening two or three times as she tried to find what to say next. She finally raised a hand, and found, "Stop. Rewind. Tell me from the start. What the hell happened?"

"Oh, I dunno. I didn't know anything. I had just arranged the buying of the car wash and agreed to launder all the money, and I didn't know anything at all."

"And then suddenly Walt told you that our entire family was going to be killed?"

"Basically, yeah. I got a phone call from you first. I'd just got home, and you called to say about the threat to Hank. I asked Walt what it meant, he told me. One of the only times he ever told me anything real. And as far as I know, one of very few times when he didn't know what to do and he was as scared as I was."

"I called him, though! I told him to come to our house, and he said he was at the car wash, but he was actually here making a bomb!"

"Yep."

"Was that his plan all along? Send you and the kids to our place, and then he makes a bomb alone in the house?"

"I don't think so. It went on for a while. I think it took him a while to think his way out of it. When I left to go to your house, I thought that he would be killed and that I would never see him again."

"But you were so… breezy about it! Flynn and I were saying that Walt should come to our place, and you were like, 'No, he's fine!'"

"If Walt had come to us, we all would have been in a lot more danger."

Marie threw up her arms. "Jesus, Skyler, you could get an Emmy for that!"

Skyler shrugged. "I did what I had to do. We all would have been in a lot more danger if anybody had known what was actually going on."

Marie turned away, the pain of all the lies falling on top of her once more.

"If it makes you feel any better, the whole time, inside my head I was screaming." Skyler swallowed. "And there were so many thoughts, it just wouldn't stop, it was like a hamster wheel in my head running through all the scenarios of what I could do and how that would help or how it wouldn't help or how we… well, most of the scenarios ended in our deaths, so I just stayed silent. And then suddenly Fring was dead and it was all over. Except that it wasn't. For me it was just starting."

"What was just starting?"

"Walt was... That was the point. He took on a major drug lord, and he won. And that went to his head. And he just thought he could do whatever he wanted from that point. I think he did change at that point, I think he became more arrogant, but actually I think the change had been going on for a while, it was just that I hadn't realised. I thought he was still the chemistry teacher who was in over his head. So to find out that he wasn't and that that he was capable of building a bomb to murder somebody... That scared me a lot. And then he was acting like none of it was a big deal, and he just keep doing it, he didn't learn any lesson from the fact that our entire family almost died, he just kept doing it, all of it at an even higher level than he was before, and he wasn't doing it to hurt me. He was just doing it because he felt he could. Suddenly he had this power, and it went to his head. He just didn't want to let it go. And then I realised that _I_ was the one who was in over my head. I was the one who couldn't get out."

"Oh, Skyler. Why didn't you just tell me? I could have helped. I really wanted to help. If you'd just told me."

Skyler nodded. "If the situation were reversed, what would you do?"

"I've wondered that. I did try to think about that. But I just can't imagine it, because... Hank wouldn't…"

"No. No, he wouldn't."

"If Walt was here now, I would punch him in the stomach for Hank, whack him across the side of the head for Flynn, and I'd kick him in the nuts for you."

Skyler chuckled hollowly. "Thanks." She gritted her teeth as she tried to keep from crying. Her entire body was tingling, and her head was swimming. Marie read the look on her face and put a hand on her shoulder. Skyler made a strangled noise as she gasped and gulped down more tears.

"Come on, let it out," said Marie, putting her arms around her.

Skyler took in a gasping breath. "Thank you, Marie. I have no idea what you're still doing here, but thank you."

"I'm still here because you're my sister and I love you."

Skyler wept.


End file.
